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

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Panoptica, Cisco’s Cloud Application Security solution

SHOW NOTES:

• 10 Years of Kubernetes
• 30 Years of Linux
• 10 Years of OpenStack
• 25 Years of Java

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

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show @ the enterprise ai show dot com
• Bluesky: @TheEntAIShow.bsky.social
• Twitter/X: @TheEntAIShow
• Instagram: @TheEntAIShow