
A “Perfect Storm” Moment for Multibillion-Dollar Open Source Companies - amitkumar01
http://recode.net/2014/03/25/a-perfect-storm-moment-for-multibillion-dollar-open-source-companies/
======
davexunit
>The open source movement arose when developers realized they could create
software in a community-driven environment, letting everyone add knowledge in
return for sharing in the collective product.

The author is simplifying history here to serve his own purpose. The open
source movement was born out of the free software movement that had been
around for 15 years prior. This rebranding was done in order to market free
software to businesses by removing the ethical and political arguments and
replacing them with technical ones.

>The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for
free, and then charge for additional features.

I disagree. I don't see many admirers of "open core" model. The community was
so happy that MySQL became "open core" that distributions have started
switching to MariaDB.

~~~
e15ctr0n
The term "open source" was created by Eric Raymond (ESR)[1] on 8 February 1998
when Mozilla was in the process of making its source code public. This has
been described in detail in the book 'Open Sources: Voices from the Open
Source Revolution'[3].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Open_source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Open_source)

[2] [http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/open-
source.html)

[3]
[http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond2.html](http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond2.html)

------
michaelneale
I have not seen the term "perfect storm" used to mean something positive like
this - perhaps this is normal? (sorry, no comment on article comment, just was
perplexed by headline).

~~~
_delirium
From some spot-checking, it looks like it's minority usage, but not too rare.

Looking at the top 10 or so stories that come up with
[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=perfect+storm)
I see a few that use it in the positive sense: "Being Santa: a perfect storm
of fun", "What the perfect storm of cloud, Big Data and the Internet of
Things...", "A perfect storm has been brewing for palladium this month which
has pushed the metal impressively north-bound..."

~~~
koralatov
The Wikipedia's page on it has an interesting origin[1]:

    
    
        The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going
        back to 1718 for “perfect storm,” though the earliest citations
        use the phrase positively, as in a “perfect storm” of applause.
    

It also notes that the phrase,

    
    
        is nearly synonymous with "worst-case scenario," although the
        latter carries more of a hypothetical connotation.
    

The phrase is relatively rare in normal British English usage, and it's
usually used in the ``worst-case scenario'' sense. To me, the word `storm'
brings with it a negative connotation, but I suppose it's logical enough,
albeit a little strange, that it could be used to describe a positive set of
circumstances.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm)

------
emeidi
... says a guy working for a company heavily invested in an OSS vendor. But
please, dear reader, don't expect any bias or even wishful thinking.

(Disclaimer: I use OSS software heavily and admire it, but I'm always
sceptical when I read statements like "The time is now to make money in open
source")

~~~
koralatov
At least in this case, he leads with the fact he has a financial interest in
the field: ``At Index Ventures, we have been investing...''. Too many similar
pieces either bury that important piece of information, or omit it entirely.

------
tenfourty
I completely agree that open source is/has taken over the world - and that
that is a fundamentally good thing for everyone on this planet.

I did notice some things that aren't quite right though so here are some
comments from a Red Hat employee - though these are my opinions and not
necessarily those of my employer.

> The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for
> free, and then charge for additional features.

and

>Companies can try a simple version of an open source app for free, and if
they like it, can pay for value-added enterprise features.

This is not actually true for the way Red Hat sells it's products, in fact we
do something that is quite the opposite but far more powerful. All features
are in our community projects like Fedora or JBoss Wildfly, these features
might be a mix of whatever is the latest and greatest that people want as well
as all the normal bits that you'd expect. When we make an enterprise ready
product out of these community projects like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
or JBoss Enterprise Application Server (EAP) our focus is actually on
stability and longevity, in other words something that we can stand behind and
support for up to 10 years or more! So we actually remove or don't pull in
features from the project that aren't ready yet (which we know because we
employ a lot of the professional engineers that are committers). We then have
a rigorous testing process before releasing these enterprise ready products to
our subscribers. One of the key bits that people don't understand is that once
we release an enterprise product we will then back port from the latest and
greatest community version all security and bug fixes for the supported life
of the enterprise product.

Two things to note about this, the enterprise versions are open source as well
and we follow an upstream first approach so bug fixes and security patches are
applied to the upstream version as well as to the stable enterprise version so
upstream has all the latest fixes BUT it also has all the latest features and
changes so it's more like our R&D version that you can play with and do some
development on but wouldn't be something we would stand behind for production
environments.

I wanted to point this out as this is fundamentally different from the open
core model you describe and which I seriously object to as an approach because
it still locks you into the vendor who is selling you the extra bits.

> The first wave of open source leaders, including Red Hat, relied almost
> entirely on the community to build their products.

I'm not sure this statement is entirely true, Red Hat has been a top committer
to the Linux kernel and to the JBoss projects for many many years and in fact
around half of our company are professional engineers working on open source
projects!

~~~
davidw
> > The first wave of open source leaders, including Red Hat, relied almost
> entirely on the community to build their products.

> I'm not sure this statement is entirely true

Red Hat is a good open source community citizen, and has contributed tons
back, without a doubt. However... out of the total lines of code they
distribute, if you start to consider Apache and the GNU tools, and various
libraries, I wonder what the percentages look like? I think all things
considered, it would reflect well on Red Hat for all they _have_ done, but
still likely be a small-ish percentage.

