By Peter Zaitsev, Founder at Percona
The second annual CIVO Navigate North America has come to a close – putting the wraps on one of the first major cloud-native conferences of the year and marking what was by all measures a very successful start to the 2024 event calendar. From February 20th – 21st, upwards of 1,000 industry professionals descended on Austin for two jam-packed days of talks, keynotes and workshops led by some of the industry’s foremost thought leaders.
Topics ranged from artificial intelligence and machine learning to cloud-native security and sustainability. However, one topic that featured prominently was that of open source. Right from the opening keynote, Docker co-founder and current Dagger.io co-founder and CEO Solomon Hykes spoke at length about the topic, establishing it as one of the through-lines for the event.
In addition to being an engaged audience member, I was also lucky enough to speak on the subject myself at this year’s event. So, for all of those who couldn’t make it to Austin, I’d like to offer a brief retrospective on the state of open source and where it features in our increasingly cloud-native world.
The Changing Face of Open Source
In my presentation, “The State of Open Source”, I took the opportunity to reflect on the most significant developments, challenges, and opportunities that shaped the world of open source in 2023, as well as how it fits into our increasingly cloud-native world.
This is undoubtedly an exciting time for open source. Most recent estimates find that over 94% of companies now use at least some open source software. And nearly all software today, including proprietary solutions, make use of at least some open source components.
However, this growth in adoption hasn’t come without its challenges. In the early days of open source, the movement was composed predominantly of passionate advocates, motivated first and foremost by the model’s ethical and philosophical underpinnings – the principles of freedom, choice, permissionless innovation, and the fundamental belief that everyone should benefit from technological advancements.
Over the years, however, open source adoption has become less about these underlying principles and more about the advantages it confers to businesses. Reduced overhead, increased flexibility, and the benefit of community-driven innovation all make open source an attractive option for many businesses. And as a result, over the years, open source has gone from a fringe movement to the very definition of mainstream.
The Rise of the Open Source Bait & Switch
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the motivations behind open source adoption have changed, so too have the motivations behind open source development. Over the past few years, we’ve seen numerous high-profile companies claw back their open source licenses. MongoDB, Hashicorp, and Elastic have all decided to make license changes that effectively render their software no longer open source.
Legal though it may be, the ethics behind this kind of open source bait and switch are questionable at best. What these companies have come to realize is that, while open source is good for driving adoption and accelerating early stage development, it’s less effective at extracting value. So, as open source companies mature, and pressure from investors mounts, many organizations are making the decision to go back on their promises of open source.
In this way, companies have realized that they can get all the benefits of open source licensing (i.e. increased adoption, community contributions & involvement) while also enjoying the full revenue-generating potential of proprietary licenses.
A New Lexicon is Needed for Open Source
Moving forward, we will have to develop additional terminology to address the changing open source landscape. No longer will the binary of open source versus proprietary be enough to capture the different gradations we see in today’s software ecosystem.
For example, in light of the aforementioned trend, one distinction that is becoming increasingly important to make is that of open source governance – meaning, is the open source project governed by a for-profit corporation, or a non-profit organization? If we look at the organizations that have embraced the bait and switch – Red Hat, MongoDB, Elastic, and Hashicorp – they are all private, for-profit companies. Meanwhile, projects such as Linux, Kubernetes, and PostgreSQL, which have remained fully open source, are all owned and governed by non-profit organizations.
This isn’t to say that every for-profit corporation is likely to follow in those companies’ footsteps. However, it is an important distinction to be made as we face an increasingly fractured “open source” ecosystem. This is also why we must recognize that the quality of openness now exists on a spectrum, ranging from wholly proprietary, closed solutions, to source available, to permissive open-source projects, all the way to the public domain.
As an open source advocate, I put my support behind fully permissive open-source licensing. Ultimately, we need to ensure the current definition of open source, as outlined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), is kept intact, and not allow corporate interests to bend the definition in such a way as to claim to be “open source” when they are in fact not. However, relying on a simple binary of open source and proprietary is clearly no longer sufficient. At the end of the day, although source-available and “copyleft” licenses may not fully satisfy the definition of open-source, they are preferable to (and worthy of distinction from) completely closed, proprietary licenses. And, as the movement matures and sees wider and wider adoption, it’s safe to assume that we will continue to see licenses that establish new gradations of the openness spectrum.
The Shape of Open Source in the Cloud
Most recent projections expect the cloud-native software market to balloon by over 23% year-over-year, reaching a staggering $25.3 billion by 2030. With so much potential wealth tied up in this growing market, it should come as no surprise that corporations are hard-at-work cornering as much of the market with solutions as possible. And this holds true of both cloud-native applications and the infrastructure underpinning the cloud itself.
And, in that realm, organizations like the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (the group at the helm of Kubernetes) are giving AWS and the like a run for their money. I believe that’s because the open source model is by far the most effective means of delivering on the cloud’s originally intended role as commoditized infrastructure – in which computing is drawn from the cloud just as electricity is drawn from the grid.
With AWS and the like, users find themselves highly constrained by vendor lock-in and aggressive payment structures that fail to deliver on the promise of an on-demand utility which you pay for only as much as you use. With open source solutions, users have the freedom to run any application anywhere, with the freedom to pick from any number of applications and vendors. Unsurprisingly, this has led to significant growth in the field. Indeed, in one of their most recent industry surveys, the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation found that, across all categories, open source projects already rank among the most frequently used solutions in the cloud-native world.
Open Source Features Highly on List of Cloud-Native Considerations
If this year’s CIVO Navigate conference was any indication, that trend will surely continue for the foreseeable future. This year’s event saw multiple presentations either focused on or featuring the topic of open source – and of course, no shortage of talks and workshops dedicated to Kubernetes. No matter how you look at it, it’s clear that the topic of open source ranks high on the list of considerations of the cloud-native world.
Despite a shifting landscape and increasing pressure from investors to go proprietary, it’s clear that open source isn’t going anywhere. Whether you look at the software ecosystem on the whole, or narrow your focus to the cloud-native category, open source is and will remain a large part of the landscape for the foreseeable future.
For those who’d like to take a closer look at CIVO Navigate NA 2024, you can find comprehensive wrap-ups of Day 1 and Day 2 on the official Civo blog at www.civo.com/blog.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Zaitsev is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Percona. As one of the foremost experts on open source strategy and databases optimization, Peter leveraged both his technical vision and entrepreneurial skills to grow Percona from a two-person shop to one of the most respected open source companies in the business. Now Peter continues as a Board Member & Advisor in a range of open source startups. Peter is a co-author of High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication, one of the most popular books on MySQL performance.
