Open Source Software: A Digital Snail Darter
November 26, 2019
Years ago I worked on a project. The focus was the snail darter, a little fish. A commercial initiative intruded on the habitat of the creature. The bureaucratic process chugged forward. I lost track of the snail darter. Probably there are a few of the creatures around, but their future was impinged upon by the need and desire to covert streams and “undeveloped” land into a wonderland of EPA compliant effluent, asphalt, and industrial facilities.
Wikipedia’s image shows a paper clip next to a snail darter. This reminds me of my mobile phone next to an Amazon data center.
I thought about the snail darter when I read “Dining Preferences of the Cloud and Open Source: Who Eats Who?” Not surprisingly the write up does not mention the snail darter or its obstruction of “progress”. But the article describes how open source has found its digital manifestations threatened by large commercial firms.
There is a description of Amazon’s method which has disrupted to some degree the happiness of Elastic (developers and maintainers of Elasticsearch) and MongoDB (a DBaaS service). No, I don’t know what DBaaS is. It may be a way to make community supported software tough in a cloud eat cloud datasphere.
We noted this passage:
Most of the current debate focuses on Amazon and a few open source companies they have startled, like gazelles on the savannah, specifically Elastic and MongoDB. All while chronically prefacing their messaging with “customers tell us…”, AWS is offering its own services that are built on (Elastic) or are compatible with (MongoDB) popular open source projects, thereby competing with the relatively successful commercial open source companies associated with those projects. In the case of Elastic, AWS has generously created a new open source distribution of the features that Elastic had held back as proprietary software. The prey have responded with both pluckily defiant blog posts and a frenzy of license engineering to impede AWS’ ability to use their ostensibly open source software. Others, like Cockroach Labs and Redis Labs, have followed with their own new licenses. This has renewed an existential and philosophical debate about open source: is it about free speech or does it also include the right to a free moat for key project contributors? In the end, the high priests of open source do not seem to be endorsing the “open except for people who compete with us” approach.
The main point is that the business model is in place, working, and becoming more important to many developers and organizations.
But Amazon is not unique. Google and Microsoft are following the lead of AWS. Sheep do not appear to be at risk when they tag along, content to generate revenue by playing the me-too game.
The write up concludes on an upbeat; specifically:
Open source is here to stay as a development model. It is hard to imagine any kind of infrastructure or developer software that isn’t open source. But there is work to do on the accompanying business strategy. The next great open source endeavor may be to make multi-cloud a reality, at least for key workloads. But the new associated business models will have to embrace services as the primary delivery model and make a serious commitment to a level of integration that is the hallmark of cloud services.
Net net: There are still some snail darters.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
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