Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations
I've worked in open source my entire career1. To say that I'm worried about the impact recent events have on the open source ecosystem would be an understatement.
In the past couple months:
- Red Hat effectively killed CentOS
- Elastic effectively killed Elasticsearch
People may rightfully refute these statements, but the statements are more complicated than you might think. Killing a project doesn't mean the project will vanish overnight, but what has happened so far is two very large companies in the 'enterprise open source' space have shown the chinks in the armor of the monetization of open source software.
For many years, everyone in the industry pointed at Red Hat as the shining example of 'how to build a company around open source'.
And for the past decade, the open source Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana logging ecosystem was on a tear, becoming a standard in the open source cloud stack.