Open-source and cloud computing: an unstable marriage

Article title: open source and cloud computing: an unstable marriage. Linux is a technology channel of the IT lab in China. Includes basic categories such as desktop applications, Linux system management, kernel research, embedded systems, and open source.

Open-source software is helping vendors create cloud computing architectures. no one may doubt this. But will cloud computing in turn help vendors behind open-source software? Or can it help these manufacturers who make money through commercial support stick to their own business positions?

Recently, the open-source cloud computing forum sponsored by the famous open-source vendor Red Hat kicked off, trying to answer this and other related questions in terms of business and technology. The technology is controllable. now let's talk about the business.

At this forum, Brian Stevens, vice president of Red Hat engineering and chief technology officer, gave an important speech and discussed some topics that we are very familiar with. the main points are as follows:

◆ IT is no longer regarded as a cost center, but a way to realize commercial value.

◆ Cloud computing includes virtualization and other services, which can make the rigid IT system architecture more elastic and flexible, and make IT departments easier to grasp the use of IT systems by other departments, in this way, you can better plan the downtime to replace the hardware or software of the IT system.

◆ Independent software vendors believe that the cloud computing trend is inevitable and no longer oppose or even support deploying their applications on the cloud.

◆ Service level agreements on public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, are well-developed for application development and testing. establishing and running a service to test the code performance can reflect significant speed advantages, even so, for the application deployment of production enterprises, the security guarantee and service level agreement for applications and data on the cloud are not good enough.

In the eyes of Red Hat, a commercial version of Linux, the transition to the cloud architecture will not be worse, or even better than the old method of directly selling products to user accounts. It is easier for future cloud architecture builders to sell commercial licenses for their enterprise edition Linux combination tools, and the number of licenses for users is usually tens of thousands or even up to millions, it is very difficult to sell the same number of licenses by direct sales or channel sales.

Although theoretically speaking, it is possible to make only one transaction, but it has sold a large number of valuable support contracts. Then, companies that deploy applications on the public cloud may want to create similar architectures within their own private cloud so that you can sell more licenses.

There are only a few issues in this theory. First, as far as we know, companies that really sell cloud architectures, including Amazon, Google, and many other companies, do not actually use commercial Linux versions to create their clouds. For all server operating system vendors, including those that do not sell open source software but sell support services, this is bad news; for all commercial management program vendors, this is also not a good thing. we find that they seldom receive phone calls after launching their own products. In addition, for server manufacturers, Google is even worse, because Google uses its own customized servers.

Both Google and Amazon have actually created their own Linux versions. In addition, Amazon also has its own Xen Management program. As industry analyst Matthew Aslett pointed out, Amazon and Google provide services based on open-source software, so they do not need to provide feedback to the open-source community for changes to open-source software under GPL V2. Feedback is required only when they spread the software.

Therefore, when open source benefits cloud service providers, this vulnerability in GPL v2 allows them to retain their intellectual property rights, therefore, the idea that cloud computing will help open-source communities is not clear yet.