Written by Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, RackN
I believe that open source development is key to building resilient software but I’m worried about its future. I’m worried because our current business models are not working: our open governance foundations are fighting trench warfare (OSF vs CNCF vs CFF) and leading sponsors of independent projects (Redis & Mongo) are retrofitting commercial protections. OpenStack just announced an expansion of their mission that I would consider “Even Bigger Tent” since it further expands the scope of the project without focusing on core utility.
While core utility and user experience should be priority one, those drivers seem to take a back seat to which license is adapted and how much of the software can be used for free. This is clearly backwards.
I think open source development is very important because it ensures quality and transparency; however, it is not reliably supporting the authors of the software. When we don’t reliably support the authors then projects become consulting platforms instead of software products. That matters because software products create a virtuous cycle where the authors have incentives to reduce the cost of support and operation. Projects sustained as consulting platforms (e.g.: OpenStack) do not have a positive commercial feedback loop to improve customer experience. That difference creates confusing choices for users who did not expect to sign up for sustained consulting investment.
With this in mind, I wanted to define “open infrastructure” in a way that creates sustainable software because it encourages reinforcing positive behaviors from the community of users and generating sustaining revenue for authors. Here are my four pillars for open infrastructure and, surprise, none of them is about the source code license or structure:
- Strong Utility & User Experience – the software must both perform its core functions well and make it easy for users to learn and operate. It’s not enough to do the job well: the experience has to be widely repeatable.
- Focus & Composability – the software’s mission and scope should be narrow and clear to everyone participating. A narrow focus requires the software be designed as friendly to working with other components. That means cross-project collaboration and interaction are encouraged and accomodated.
- Commercial Ecosystem – the software needs to be structured to allow a vendors to protect their unique value adds. Without a clear and protected revenue stream from production users, vendors have no incentive to collaborate on the commons. The open/free governance of the project needs to manage free-riding and avoid diluting vendor monetization.
- Shared User Experience – the software needs to be structured to maximize shared user experience over shared developer experience. Users working together create more value for the whole ecosystem and that both attracts and directs developer investment in a virtuous cycle.
These four pillars are the foundation for strong open software and, ultimately, open infrastructure. In my model, that means finding strategic open source components and embracing a profit motive to feed the system too. For example, I believe the closed source public clouds have encouraged stronger open ecosystems than rival “open infrastructure” options. This happens because those companies have strong incentives to focus on utility, experience, ecosystem and collaboration.
I’d love to hear your opinion about these open infrastructure pillars because I believe that user collaboration is essential to protecting our industry. Without the ability to create and share best practices, we will quickly find ourselves beholden to a small number of mammoth closed infrastructure platforms. We saw this pattern in the 90s with Cisco, Oracle, Sun and Microsoft and it looks like that pattern is repeating.
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About the Author
Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, RackN
Rob’s first startup literally patented the cloud. He has been in the cloud and infrastructure space for 20 years and has done everything from working with early ESX betas to serving four terms on the OpenStack Foundation Board and as an executive at Dell. As a co-founder of the Digital Rebar project, Rob created a new generation of DevOps orchestration to leverage the containers and service-oriented ops. He believes that the technology of running data centers and applications cannot work without also addressing process and people challenges. He trained as an Engineer from degrees from Duke (BS Mechanical) and LSU (MS Industrial).
