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> That’s the strategy. That’s the magic. You don’t need to go Open Core or any other permutation of kind-of, sort-of open source. You can open source everything

> That’s the strategy. That’s the magic. You don’t need to go Open Core or any other permutation of kind-of, sort-of open source. You can open source everything and just ensure you have a rock-solid managed cloud service. This reliance on cloud is what’s driving MongoDB, Confluent, DataStax, Redis Labs, and others to great success. It can be your model, too. It's not clear how this would work with a Linux distribution that has already been commoditized by the cloud vendors. Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand, and probably soon Amazon Linux will stand on its own feet similar to ElasticSearch, thanks to the Red Hat move

cowsandmilk 6y ago
> Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand AL2 doesn’t map up to a single version of CentOS already and Amazon would probably be happy to move to being upstream of RHEL for the sake of their kernel team. Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product.
- koolba 6y ago
  > Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product. Amazon Linux outside of Amazon is purely to facilitate local build and test pipelines, both of which are meant to encourage AWS deployments. They don’t directly make money off it.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    A shame b/c they would get a ton of developer love by giving us what CentOS did.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yes, the issue isn't that people want another Red Hat family ecosystem distro. That want one that (nearly) exactly mirrors a specific RHEL point release plus major bug and security patches backports.
  - zitterbewegung 6y ago
    And Amazon validates it on its hardware
- indymike 6y ago
  The previous commenter clearly has not used AL2 and CentOS or they never would have claimed it is a rebrand.
simplecto 6y ago
I tend to agree. However, there are some very, very large clients out there who have the resources and expertise to run open-source themselves. This level of enterprise customer is a tough nut to crack because of the infrastructure monolith that lives inside. Perhaps they might spend the money for professional services or something in their private cloud, but that money is peanuts compared to the valued created by the free software.
- Torwald 6y ago
  > I tend to agree. However, there are some very, very large clients out there who have the resources… As far as my business experience goes, I would say this is what can make such a system: your sales force. Have a very good sales team that lands a couple of large key clients early. Yes, it is still the case after +30 years old web and a +10 years old iPhone: the buying decisions include a myriad of reasons, many of them non-technological. A good sales expert can slash through that. So, yeah, courageous and good management can make it. Specially in a case like this, were it is not necessary to make a paradigm shift in innovation happen. Here we have a player who just needs to box himself onto the table and keep dancing.
  - simplecto 6y ago
    A good salesperson flagged with sales-engineers and professional services, but they will be ham-strung by their product roadmap, and the roadmap of the cloud-services they deploy into. Now you have two problems. The vendor, and the vendor's vendor, who is (cloud provider). There will be resource limits, VPC peering limits (1g, 10G , 100G), and a myriad of other things that subtly change how deals are done and the donuts are made. Then, when clients are big enough, these vendors quickly begin to offer bespoke solutions which, again, subtly change how they operate and do business. This creates friction at all levels because we now have classical bespoke enterprise solutions inside "uniformed" scalable cloud solutions. We might have just as well stayed in place and expanded in our own data center, run it ourselves in the compute cloud, or in some smaller cases, just buy the company we wanted to do business with.
api 6y ago
Works until a big cloud vendor or someone with more funding clones it and takes all the revenue. This is why MongoDB uses an AGPL-like license and CockroachDB uses BSL. Forget what license Redis uses but it’s similar I think. The software biz these days is a dark forest.
- kdazzle 6y ago
  I don’t think “lack of funding” is something IBM has to worry about at the moment. As much as I might like it to be.
stephenr 6y ago
Redis Labs seems an odd inclusion: they specifically have a non-oss version that’s got significant features not available in the oss version. It seems hard to believe their success could be attributed to “a hosted cloud service” given that the core product didn’t even support TLS or SSL natively until this past year.

cowsandmilk 6y ago

> Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand AL2 doesn’t map up to a single version of CentOS already and Amazon would probably be happy to move to being upstream of RHEL for the sake of their kernel team. Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product.

koolba 6y ago
> Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product. Amazon Linux outside of Amazon is purely to facilitate local build and test pipelines, both of which are meant to encourage AWS deployments. They don’t directly make money off it.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  A shame b/c they would get a ton of developer love by giving us what CentOS did.
ghaff 6y ago
Yes, the issue isn't that people want another Red Hat family ecosystem distro. That want one that (nearly) exactly mirrors a specific RHEL point release plus major bug and security patches backports.
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  And Amazon validates it on its hardware
indymike 6y ago
The previous commenter clearly has not used AL2 and CentOS or they never would have claimed it is a rebrand.

simplecto 6y ago

I tend to agree. However, there are some very, very large clients out there who have the resources and expertise to run open-source themselves. This level of enterprise customer is a tough nut to crack because of the infrastructure monolith that lives inside. Perhaps they might spend the money for professional services or something in their private cloud, but that money is peanuts compared to the valued created by the free software.

Torwald 6y ago
> I tend to agree. However, there are some very, very large clients out there who have the resources… As far as my business experience goes, I would say this is what can make such a system: your sales force. Have a very good sales team that lands a couple of large key clients early. Yes, it is still the case after +30 years old web and a +10 years old iPhone: the buying decisions include a myriad of reasons, many of them non-technological. A good sales expert can slash through that. So, yeah, courageous and good management can make it. Specially in a case like this, were it is not necessary to make a paradigm shift in innovation happen. Here we have a player who just needs to box himself onto the table and keep dancing.
- simplecto 6y ago
  A good salesperson flagged with sales-engineers and professional services, but they will be ham-strung by their product roadmap, and the roadmap of the cloud-services they deploy into. Now you have two problems. The vendor, and the vendor's vendor, who is (cloud provider). There will be resource limits, VPC peering limits (1g, 10G , 100G), and a myriad of other things that subtly change how deals are done and the donuts are made. Then, when clients are big enough, these vendors quickly begin to offer bespoke solutions which, again, subtly change how they operate and do business. This creates friction at all levels because we now have classical bespoke enterprise solutions inside "uniformed" scalable cloud solutions. We might have just as well stayed in place and expanded in our own data center, run it ourselves in the compute cloud, or in some smaller cases, just buy the company we wanted to do business with.

api 6y ago

Works until a big cloud vendor or someone with more funding clones it and takes all the revenue. This is why MongoDB uses an AGPL-like license and CockroachDB uses BSL. Forget what license Redis uses but it’s similar I think. The software biz these days is a dark forest.

kdazzle 6y ago
I don’t think “lack of funding” is something IBM has to worry about at the moment. As much as I might like it to be.

stephenr 6y ago

Redis Labs seems an odd inclusion: they specifically have a non-oss version that’s got significant features not available in the oss version. It seems hard to believe their success could be attributed to “a hosted cloud service” given that the core product didn’t even support TLS or SSL natively until this past year.