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From being regarded as “cancer”, “tumor” to now The technology giants are regarded as the standard and the competition, and it seems that the status of open source has already undergone a huge reversal. In fact, the development of open source software is not as painful as imagined. Over the past 20 years, open source has never been far from threatening its own power, and even fell into the abyss of “destined failure”. Fortunately, the worst time has passed. This new world is at least much better than the giant monopoly of Microsoft in the 1990s, but the future is still uncertain.

A problem has been dealt with, another problem has arisen, and thinking has been active. —— John Dewey “Deterministic Search. Method First”

Open source has never been far from the power of threatening itself.

The recent official blog of keyDB has published an article that is a strong shot for the open source world. Here is a summary of the article:

Time goes nowhere, but events that happened in the past cannot be erased. Probably history is only fair at this point.

For Halloween 20 years ago, a file called “Memorandum” flowed from within Microsoft, saying that Linux is a threat to Windows. Even CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux “cancer.” However, Microsoft is not the biggest threat to open source. In addition to developers, in fact, open source did not affect Microsoft’s business at the time. What is more serious is the internal treatment. If you don’t see a fierce debate, it may cause confusion, and then destroy the community, and even the whole project. (Editor’s Note: The split history of the BSD system is the best material to support this assertion). There are a few issues that may be plaguing people so far:

• Which people who modify open source code should strictly enforce GPL licenses?

• Or is the modified code considered to be your own property?

The debate continues to the freedom of developers, or the freedom of users, a group represented by the Free Software Foundation, a group represented by the Apache Foundation, and a more lenient group represented by MIT and BSD… …. Open source has never formed a unified front, which may be the main reason for its failure, as Microsoft hopes.

Just when no one is optimistic about open source, Red Hat has emerged in a very unique way: the software itself is free, but provides services and support to users, which in turn makes a profit. Under such a business model, the choice of license is largely irrelevant because the code (and the software compiled by the code) does not generate revenue.

In this case, the above debate is a bit speechless, and they can be peacefully coexisting. If the software under the BSD license runs on the GPL’s Linux kernel and the GNU user space is very harmonious, it seems to have become “like a free beer” as described by Richard Stallman, which may be completely beyond the FSF he and he created. (Free Software Foundation) imagination. The rise of Red Hat has surprised those who predict that open source has no future. Even when Red Hat’s performance in the server operating system climbs, Microsoft’s achievements in the server field are lacking.

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Complete a goal and find another goal ahead. This is a never-ending pursuit. —— Edward Wilson, The Origin of Creation

But the story didn’t end here, and it’s just beginning. The era of Red Hat’s rise is the era when everyone buys servers, installs operating systems, and deploys applications to their own data centers. However, technology has never stopped its development. Amazon sees this huge business opportunity, that is: not everyone is willing to put their own data center, maintenance server, operating system should be handed over to more professional people, Amazon will manage everything, from deployment to Run the database so that people don’t even have to buy products from other vendors, Amazon canTo provide one-stop service.

The emergence of the challenger
 

At this time, Red Hat got another favor. On July 9 this year, IBM spent $34 billion to acquire Red Hat, the largest acquisition in the company’s history. For the open source world, it is also a legendary enough to be included in the history of development. As the world’s largest open source community, Red Hat has spiked a number of open source companies in terms of profitability, and its performance has been leaping forward. On the eve of the acquisition, Red Hat’s revenue was nearly $3 billion, and it has achieved profit for 66 consecutive quarters.

Red Hat sold to IBM with a “golden parachute”, however, in the open source world, it is a case. For most open source companies, especially small open source teams, the profit problem is a long-term lingering “pain”, and there are only a handful of profitable people. In March of this year, Nginx, which has 340 million website users worldwide, sold its competitor F5 at a low price of only US$670 million. For the open source community or software vendors, there are not a few people who struggle with profit like Nginx and finally get a low price.

The difficulty in making money is largely due to the lack of a suitable business model. When it comes to open source, everyone’s first feeling is free. How to use the open source model to make money, many companies have not explored a particularly good path, and self-developed open source software requires developers to invest a lot of money and energy, and maintain open source. The cost of the project is high, so it is often too much to make ends meet.

Most relatively small companies are not as lucky as Red Hat. Without a reliable business model, investors will not take care of them. Many companies want to stick to the bottom line of open source and try to use open source licenses. For example, MongoDB invented the “server-side public license.” However, this did not get the support of most people, just as the Open Source Initiative did not recognize similar licenses, and community members also strongly resisted (Faro, Homebrew and other famous distributions, all removed MongoDB.– Editor’s Note) This also indicates that the practice of modifying the license is invalid.

There are some more extreme companies that take the route of abandoning open source. The only thing they have with open source is that they can access their code. This may be a tribute to open source. Some licenses such as “source code visible” and “open core” will of course be adopted, and it is expected to be a life-saving straw for the licensing model. Of course, this is a few steps away from the freedom advocated by Richard Stallman, such as: ” Users have the right to ‘run, copy, distribute, research, change and improve the software'”. If you do this, you will only be able to learn.

An unlikely savior
 

When it seems that open source is going to be destroyed, Amazo