Looking at the advanced of Open source business model from Red Hat, GitHub and Docker

Technically speaking, Docker is certainly commendable, such as "Write once run Anywhere", simplifying ci/cd, more efficient than VM, and so on. The author argues that the Docker business model is more compelling than the open source business model.

What profit does open source depend on? Many people may first react to the Red Hat pattern by providing technical support, training, and certification to make money. But this is a very traditional business model, only to reduce the upfront license costs. Of course, this model is still viable, such as Hortonworks, which provides this service pattern on the basis of Hadoop, has just come on the market. But the authors say this is not a good business model.

The commercial ecology of open source has three parts: the open source project itself, the value-added projects based on the project, and the monetization approach.

For example, in the Red Hat business model, Linux is the open source project itself, Rhel is a value-added project, and its services are the way Linux monetization. One of the reasons why the authors think they can succeed is that the use of Linux is a challenging task in the 90 's.

While GitHub is exploring a better fit for the current model, Git is an Open-source project designed by Linus, and GitHub is a value-added service based on git, provided through SaaS or enterprise-class product models. But compared to Red hat, it adds value-added items and monetization methods, meaning that you want to use the value-added projects it offers (which means private-sector hosting, open projects are free) and you have to pay.

Docker also took the GitHub model further, Docker controlled the Dockerhub, which included open source projects Docker and Open-source projects, and announced its monetization model last week. If Docker can develop according to the current momentum, it will become a wholly ecological chain of open source software company.

To tell the truth, it's exciting and worrying! The biggest challenge for open source projects is money, and the Docker model can be a good lesson for future open source technology. If Docker the project itself is successful, in the long run will certainly bring success to Docker company.

But for the community, this may not be a good thing, because this business model may damage the ecology of the entire community, such as last week's CoreOS release of Rocket may be a precursor.

CoreOS's CEO, Alex Polvi, said: "We always thought Docker should be a simple base unit, but unfortunately things and as we expected, Docker are building tools for publishing cloud servers, cluster systems, and many including building, running, Upload and download images of the service, even including the underlying network, and want to package these features into a single binary package to run onto your server. The standardization of the container is not, we can not call it Docker container, but to change to call the Docker platform, which is the original idea of the simple module. “

I think that's where the allure of open source is, and if there are disagreements, it's like CoreOS to go the same way, which proves that any open source business model is not indestructible. But I think rocket may fail because the Docker foundation plays well and has established a sustainable business model.

Original Link: http://stratechery.com/2014/docker-integrated-open-source-company/(compilation/Zhou Xiaolu)

First CoreOS exchange activities in China (Beijing): http://huiyi.csdn.net/activity/product/goods_list?project_id=1596

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