Identifying Successful Open Source Projects
As open source companies and projects enter a transition phase of funding, licensing, community participation, let’s look at the characteristics of successful open source projects.
SHOW: 834
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #834 Transcript (https://docs.google.com/document/d/11NrpE_kAksT2cK0ELHaItT8TRAj-ngJ6G-pNSv60hBk/edit?usp=sharing)
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SHOW NOTES:
• 10 Years of Kubernetes (https://seroter.wordpress.com/?action=user_content_redirect&uuid=e503e7aa8aedf6d363fe2068135e1721d571f4c4af324f9073726dffc267993a&blog_id=649486&post_id=17073&user_id=0&subs_id=555052860&signature=a15e65c2334acb90fc342f2fb9a4c761&email_name=new-post&user_email=bgracely@gmail.com&encoded_url=aHR0cHM6Ly9rdWJlcm5ldGVzLmlvL2Jsb2cvMjAyNC8wNi8wNi8xMC15ZWFycy1vZi1rdWJlcm5ldGVzLw=)
• 30 Years of Linux (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/how-linux-has-impacted-your-lives-celebrating-30-years-of-open-source)
• 10 Years of OpenStack (https://www.openstack.org/blog/first-contribution-10-years-of-openstack/)
• 25 Years of Java (https://www.valuecoders.com/blog/technology-and-apps/java-in-last-25-years-a-staggering-look-into-past-future)
WHAT DOES SUCCESS MEAN IN OPEN SOURCE?
• There are 1000s of widely used open source projects, from Linux to Java to MySQL to Docker to Kubernetes to MongoDB
• Less projects are successful from a monetization perspective, but that’s about individual business models
• Plenty of companies during the 2010s-2020s treated open source as “marketing” and not really a development model
WHAT DOES COMMERCIAL SUCCESS LOOK LIKE IN OPEN SOURCE?
• Wide usage infrastructure – Linux, Kubernetes, OpenStack
• Complex projects vs. “it just works”
• Critical security – Vault
• Complex data services – MongoDB, Kafka
• Many companies contributing (share the costs) – Linux, Kubernetes
• Management / Observability Engines – Crossplane, Prometheus
• Programming Languages – Java, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, etc.
• Cloud services hiding complexity
• Cloud services stretching across clouds
• Single vendor projects – often move to non-OSS licensing
• Single vendor projects – difficult to maintain at scale
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by The Cloudcast
linux foundation
