{"id":30164,"date":"2019-10-31T21:33:57","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T18:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/oblaka-i-porohovaya-bochka-open-source\/"},"modified":"2019-10-31T21:33:57","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T18:33:57","slug":"oblaka-i-porohovaya-bochka-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/oblaka-i-porohovaya-bochka-open-source","title":{"rendered":"Clouds and the Powder Keg of Open Source","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Clouds
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\n\"Europe today resembles a powder keg, and the leaders are like people smoking inside it. One spark will cause an explosion that will bury us all. I don\u2019t know when this will happen, but I know where. It will all go wrong because of some silly event in the Balkans\" \u2014 Otto von Bismarck, 1878<\/i><\/p>\n

A hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed, ending World War I. The number of lives lost in that war is difficult to comprehend now. For example, in America, the Vietnam War is rightly considered a military catastrophe. Over twenty years of conflict, the U.S. lost 58,318 soldiers. In comparison, during the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, the Allies lost four times more \u2014 in just five days.
\n<\/a><\/noindex>
\nSome might say the horrors of war were impossible to predict. The problem is that at least some of the involved parties had a clear understanding of the consequences. British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey reportedly said after a speech in Parliament in support of the war: \"Lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.\"<\/p>\n

Thus, in the following years, historians attempted to answer the question: if the consequences were understood, how did they allow the July crisis<\/a><\/noindex>\u00a0\u2014 a series of interconnected events that made war the only possible outcome.<\/p>\n

Though extremely complex in detail, the answer is simple. Given the atmosphere and political structures of the time, none of the participants felt they had an alternative. One of the most frightening aspects of studying the causes of war is that, if you consider the political realities of that period, it is actually easy to understand the justifications for each state's actions.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, we will agree that war was, in fact, inevitable. The ease with which we accept this truth is truly frightening.<\/p>\n

\nThree years ago, a venture fund gathered a small group of media representatives, vendors, and analysts, including us, to discuss the importance of open source in commercial activities. After presenting their own model, a partner from the venture firm introduced a group of executives from partner commercial open-source companies. Each of them detailed how open source replaced proprietary alternatives for their clients.<\/p>\n

Of course, we agree that the move of developers to open source at the enterprise level changes the nature of supply. To some extent, this is the core belief we have been advocating for many years. As early as 2011, we published an article \u201cBottom-Up Implementation: The End of Supply As We Know It\u201d<\/a><\/noindex>. But what was interesting about the proposed model was not what it said about the present, but rather what it could not say about the future.<\/p>\n

Cloud services were not mentioned directly at the event. It was stated that investors and commercial OSS developers compete with proprietary software. No special attention was given to Amazon and other hyperscale cloud providers; they were not even named. The question on this topic was politely declined.<\/p>\n

This is interesting because at RedMonk, when evaluating commercial open source teams, we offered them to answer a standard simple question: \u201cWho is your competitor?\u201d If they named a proprietary alternative, it suggested that the company was looking to the past. If the answer was the cloud, one could confidently assume that the startup was looking ahead.<\/p>\n

As we can see, this mindset has now reached the market. In the last 12\u201318 months, there has essentially been a turning point. If previously companies did not consider mentioning cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as worthy, they now regard them as a deadly threat. The fear of cloud providers has become so overwhelming that commercial open source vendors often make strategic decisions against the advice of consultants that violate open source cultural norms, generate widespread and sustained negative PR, and jeopardize relationships with developers, partners, and customers. In particular, they increasingly turn to models that blur the lines between open source and proprietary software in an attempt to gain the advantages of both worlds, but in the end, there is a high probability that they will inherit the drawbacks of both.<\/p>\n

Commercial providers of open source took these actions after being warned in advance about the risks. This reflects their assessment of their prospects in a world increasingly dominated by massive clouds that are expanding the range of services. Undoubtedly, such strategic decisions have serious, inevitable negative consequences, but commercial open source providers\u2014or at least their investors\u2014consider inaction to be an even more destructive option.<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see if this belief persists after Amazon Web Services makes its announcement this week. Here\u2019s a brief outline of the story that led to the current events:<\/p>\n