OSS Preconditions

The last decade saw the shift from virtual machines and monolithic applications to containers and microservices. This ongoing shift wrestles control away from CIOs, who used to make end all be all vendor choices.

The second generation (Hortonworks and Cloudera building on Hadoop as examples) were developed within companies and charged customers for licenses to “commercial features.”

Years ago, investors wouldn’t touch open source software businesses. The conventional wisdom was that one could never make money selling to developers, and there were many skeletons in the graveyard that made the point. The notable exception was Red Hat (and perhaps MySQL). Flash forward to the current moment — OSS infrastructure continues to be re... See more