In a previous post , I covered the full open source strategy for enterprise open source and its risks. Completely open source code, that is, the situation in which the enterprise's self-developed software is released with a software agreement that conforms to the definition of open source.
This article presents the first strategy for addressing the risks of a fully open source world: increasing market share and open standards. It's not so much a strategy as an incentive for companies to go fully open source.
Strategy: Market Presence and Open Standards
One of the main reasons for choosing and adhering to a fully open source strategy is that enterprises hope that fully open source software will win a wide market share and even form an open standard.
Take the implementation of open source programming languages as an example. Before the language itself wins users, few companies can directly make a profit by selling the compiler or interpreter implemented by the language. After the Erlang language was developed by Joe Armstrong, a support engineer at Ericsson, a Swedish telecommunications company, the entire Erlang/OTP [1] platform was completely open. From the published documents [2] of that year , we can see the typical ideas of open standards:
Erlang/OTP was invented within Ericsson and most Erlang/OTP users are still within Ericsson. In order to speed development of Erlang/OTP, ensure a good supply of Erlang/OTP fluent programmers, minimise maintenance and development costs for the language, and keep the OTP applications up to world class, we need to spread the technology outside of Ericsson.
In other words, Ericsson's internal telecommunications system is highly dependent on the Erlang/OTP platform. In order to ensure that there are always people in the labor market who are proficient in this language and development platform, so as to ensure that no one can maintain Ericsson's internal system, Ericsson hopes to fully develop the source code. In order to promote the Erlang/OTP platform in the vast ecology outside the company. Facts have proved that this decision is the first promotion of the Erlang/OTP platform in the telecommunications industry, and its wide application in the game industry, and the development of its underlying virtual machine BEAM with the help of the new language Elixir in recent years. played a vital role. Joe built a complete open source software and development platform for Ericsson to create highly available services, but without open source, this would be just an internal system of Ericsson, a now lesser-known enterprise. It may become a legend that only exists in conversation, but it is impossible to have today's ecology.
Also part of the Erlang ecosystem, the Elixir [3] language designed by José Valim and the interpreter and web development suite it develops represent a strategy for open source to gain market share.
José originally developed an interpreter for the Elixir language at Plataformatec, which he co-founded, along with the ecto [4] tool and the Phoenix [5] framework. Later, as the usage rate of Elixir increased day by day, José founded the Dashbit [6] company to provide development and operation and maintenance support for Elixir applications.
From the perspective of Dashbit, it owns some intellectual property rights of Elixir's core ecological software, but it does not make profits by restricting the use of core software and requiring users to purchase LICENSE. This is because Elixir is still a niche language after all, and the growth of user usage is the basic disk for enterprise support. If a small achievement immediately kills chickens and catches eggs, it will be difficult for new users to get on the car with confidence, and existing users will find a way to jump out of the car. In the end, the ecology will decline, and no one will have a reason to buy LICENSE authorization.
José's title on LinkedIn is Chief Adoption Officer, the chief (user) adoption officer, which shows how much Dashbit attaches importance to the market adoption rate in its open source strategy. Similar cases include projects such as Greenplum Database, Spring Framwork, and RabbitMQ of VMWare [7]. The main business model of these companies (in related directions) is to provide support and consulting, rather than selling software or providing cloud services, so they provide support The higher the usage rate of the object of consultation, the better.
Let's look at a competing open standard strategy, the typical one of which is Google's open source matrix:
Chromium lays down half of the browser kernel. How many web apps these days state that they have only been tested on Chrome. 2.Android got the ticket in the mobile terminal market from the gap between iOS and Symbian, and finally divided the world with iOS. 3.Kubernetes and Istio are Google's attempts to actively build an ecosystem after borg technology overflows. For quite some time, using Kubernetes was "equal" to cloud native.
Google is heavily involved in the discussion or competition of the C++ standard, which can be seen from the discussions on the C++ Standards Committee in the paper Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [8] by the father of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup . It should be said that the standard dispute is fierce and even cruel. There are always attempts to lead and industry standards within the enterprise. Once the industry later faces the same problem and determines another solution as the standard, then the company will at least need to pay a considerable amount of money, not to mention that the previous R&D investment has hit the water. Extra effort to be compatible with new standards. Google is well aware of the power of this point, and Kubernetes won the container war. Compared with the failed OpenStack, Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos and the companies that invested heavily in them, Google's profits outside the books are incalculable.
Coincidentally, Facebook's React [9] front-end application development framework has become an undoubted standard. Corresponding to the weakness of Angular launched by Google, many enterprises and developers who invest in Angular have suffered heavy losses.
There are also companies in China that completely open the source code of their software out of this motivation. For example, Apache InLong [10] is the openness of data integration capabilities in Tencent's big data platform, Apache Dubbo [11] and Nacos [12] are open source representations of Alibaba's microservice setup and governance experience, and CloudWeGo [13] is ByteDance A series of open source actions for middleware capabilities, Go Kratos [14] is Bilibili's open source microservice framework. Of course, these software are concentrated in the so-called "middleware" field, which is another topic worthy of discussion and analysis.
Finally, the above mentioned are all huge or at least relatively large companies. For small companies, is there room for implementing the strategy of market adoption and open standards?
There must still be. For example, the OpenDAL [15] data access library, recently accepted into the Apache incubator , was donated by the 2021 start-up DatafuseLabs [16] . For another example, CockroachDB's storage engine Pebble [17] is open sourced under the BSD-3-Clause protocol, and even PingCAP's data import tool Lightning is also used.
Generally speaking, it is easier for small companies to use open source software to win a lot of reputation and jointly maintain the basic software that all ecological members need in niche or emerging fields.
References
[1] Erlang/OTP: https://github.com/erlang/otp[2] 发布文稿: https://web.archive.org/web/19991009002753/http://www.erlang.se/onlinenews/ErlangOTPos.shtml[3] Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/[4] ecto: https://github.com/elixir-ecto[5] Phoenix: https://github.com/phoenixframework[6] Dashbit: https://dashbit.co/[7] VMWare: https://tanzu.vmware.com/open-source[8] Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020: https://www.stroustrup.com/hopl20main-p5-p-bfc9cd4--final.pdf[9] React: https://reactjs.org/[10] Apache InLong: https://inlong.apache.org/[11] Apache Dubbo: https://dubbo.apache.org/en/index.html[12] Nacos: https://nacos.io/zh-cn/ CloudWeGo [13] : https://www.cloudwego.io/ OpenDAL : https://github.com/datafuselabs /opendal DatafuseLabs: https://databand.rs/ Pebble: https://github.com/cockroachdb/pebble[14][15][16][17]
Author丨tisonkun
Editor丨Li Jiaxin
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Introduction to Kaiyuanshe
Founded in 2014, Kaiyuan Society is composed of individual members who voluntarily contribute to the cause of open source. It is formed according to the principle of "contribution, consensus, and co-governance". It has always maintained the characteristics of vendor neutrality, public welfare, and non-profit. International integration, community development, project incubation" is an open source community federation with the mission. Kaiyuanshe actively cooperates closely with communities, enterprises and government-related units that support open source. With the vision of "Based in China and Contributing to the World", it aims to create a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem and promote China's open source community to become an active force in the global open source system. Participation and Contributors.
In 2017, Kaiyuanshe was transformed into an organization composed entirely of individual members, operating with reference to the governance model of top international open source foundations such as ASF. In the past nine years, it has connected tens of thousands of open source people, gathered thousands of community members and volunteers, hundreds of lecturers at home and abroad, and cooperated with hundreds of sponsors, media, and community partners.
