Tarus Balog is a Principal Open Source Strategist at AWS. His role is to act as a liaison between commercial open-source companies (and their related projects) and Amazon. Prior to coming to AWS, he ran a commercial open-source company for 20 years, so he has experience understanding the needs of similar organizations.
Can you summarize your “Revisiting open-source business models” speech on SCaLE 20x?
When I got involved in commercial open source full-time in 2001, there were a limited number of business models available in open source, namely services, and support. I felt it was also important to emphasize that those commercial open-source businesses were also *businesses* with the same need to provide for customers and generate revenue as proprietary software companies. To this end, I did a keynote presentation at SCaLE 8x in 2010 presenting my thoughts on how to make an open-source company successful.
Flash forward to 2023 and SCaLE 20x and a lot has changed. First of all, open source is generally known and accepted so you don’t have to spend a lot of time in the sales cycle explaining what it is. Second, the rise and adoption of cloud computing have opened up new business opportunities where a company can remain 100% open source yet generate revenue through hosting. It used to be that people didn’t take open source seriously, often comparing it to “freeware” meaning it couldn’t be used for serious applications, but now people understand that open source can be very powerful, and with that power comes complexity. You can make money by simplifying open-source solutions through hosting.
When I ran my company I would compare what we did to the work of a qualified plumber. I run a small farm and I am very comfortable in working on things that involve wood or electricity, but when it comes to plumbing I usually end up wet and frustrated. I learned that it is cheaper, overall, for me to call someone with experience to fix my plumbing issues, despite the fact that I can go to the hardware store and buy the same parts the plumber will use. Open source is a lot like that: you can get value out of it by taking the time to learn it, or you can hire someone who already knows it to show you how to extract that value.
What do you think about SCaLE 20x and its colocated events, especially KCD LA and the SCaLE Kids Day?
Let me state upfront that I am an unabashed SCaLE fanboy. My first SCaLE was 5x in 2007 and outside of the COVID years I haven’t missed a conference. I love that such a great conference is put on by volunteers and I always find value in attending.
It used to be that the terms “free software” and “open source” were synonymous, which made sense since you can map the four freedoms of the Free Software Definition to the ten requirements of the Open Source Definition. But over time “free software” has taken on more of a social component (think “so you can help your neighbor”) and “open source” has become more of a software development methodology. I don’t really see anything wrong with this but it is quite a change to see huge companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft emerge as leaders in open source. If you’ll remember there was a time when Microsoft was openly antagonistic toward open source and now they own GitHub which is where a majority of open source code is managed. I still have a soft spot for when the free and open-source software world was much smaller with a key idea being that you can own and control your own technology. SCaLE exemplifies that ideal, and I find it interesting that SCaLE is celebrating 20 years while other more commercial open-source conferences, such as LinuxWorld and OSCON, no longer exist.
So it seems only natural that other events, such as Kubernetes Community Day, DevOps Day, and PostgreSQL opt to co-locate with the conference. I am especially excited about Kids Day. I got my first computer, a TRS-80, in 1978 and I was the only kid in probably 100 miles who owned a personal computer. My options for learning were pretty much limited to monthly print magazines such as Kilobaud and Creative Computing. Now, especially with the Internet, kids can learn and become proficient in technology much more easily and this will create benefits throughout their lifetime. When I look to hire someone my main goal is to understand the future potential of the person as an employee, and the best way to do that is to look at their past achievements. Now instead of having to focus on grades or test scores, candidates can simply point me to their GitHub account.
I’ve also found that the key ingredient is community. Having like-minded people you can talk to and interact with goes a long way toward growing both intellectually and as a person. SCaLE provides the perfect platform for this with its co-located events.
What do you think of the current state and the future of open-source? What are your forecasts for the next 30 years?
Wow, that’s a big question. In 30 years I plan to be long retired (grin).
I am both encouraged and cautious about the future of open source.
First off, if this were a competition, open source has won. Fortune 10 companies like Alphabet and Amazon simply wouldn’t exist without open-source software. It’s everywhere.
Second, when I got involved in open source back in 2001 there was still a lot of doubt about it, even though Linux had been around for ten years. In addition, many companies calling themselves “open source” adopted a model called “open core” where part of the code was free but various useful features were only available as proprietary software. Brian Prentice, at Gartner, did a great job in pointing out the issues with that model in Open-Core: The Emperor’s New Clothes.
So I’m encouraged by the fact that, now, companies rarely identify themselves as being “open source” companies unless the majority of their software is available for free. A lot of companies have found they can empower their customers by using open source for at least part of their solutions without having to identify as an open-source company. A quick look at the Open Source Contributors index shows only two open source companies, Red Hat and SUSE, in the top 10.
But there is a trend in open source that I find worrying. In the past couple of years, I’ve noticed that some companies that create a popular open-source solution end up changing the license to something that isn’t open-source in order to monetize it. Now granted, since the code up to that point is open one could always fork it, but in many cases that isn’t an option due to a lack of resources. The main reason this bothers me is that if this becomes more prevalent it will build a layer of distrust around open source. Why would a company build on the open source if there is a strong chance that the rug will be pulled out from under them at a later date? I have a few ideas about this so come to my talk to hear about them (grin).