Why open source Enterprise's banner is fading

The writer, Matt Asay, is vice president of MongoDB's business development and corporate strategy. In his article, he focuses on why it is increasingly difficult to see open source in open source enterprises, in addition to the impact of some of the companies, but also the open source enterprise autonomy to reduce the dependence on open source. (The following is compiled content)
Peter Levine, a former open-source entrepreneur and venture capitalist, believes it would be a foolish thing for entrepreneurs to emulate Red Hat's well-established open source route.

Levine, in a post on TechCrunch, insists that it is almost pointless to emulate Red hat to create "another Red Hat", because "even if you use Red Hat's model to develop a corporate win, But there are countless imitators that have fallen on the road. "Although Levine is right, how can the new star companies not follow the same pattern?" he said.

Stephen O ' Grady, co-founder of RedMonk, a
industry analyst, argued: "Until 2006, after 11 years of hard work, Red hat became a billions of open source company." In fact, a long time ago someone had tried to assemble a large number of professional developers who wanted to imitate Red Hat, taking Hortonworks as an example.


However, there are many different "open source and friendly" ways to help companies build open source businesses, and red Hat mode is just one of the patterns around open source for business operations. Perhaps, just because everyone is emulating other people's model, it is difficult to find a large number of important in the whole IT industry, open source and unique open-source companies.


open source, expensive in value rather than just source code


Red hat only treats the sale of source code as a means, not a way of making a living by cutting its own bridges. In 2008, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and CTO Brian Stevens, in an interview, defined the subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The source of value to Red Hat, It's not just about cost savings, it's about the freedom of open source code. This is not to say that red hat will next reduce the amount of open source information, but rather to treat open source information more carefully.


At the moment, Red hat is selling its values rather than open source code. If you're searching for Red hat on Google Now, you can see that the company is advertising its open-source credentials, just as Chris Aniszczyk, the Open-source business manager of Twitter, says:


What Red Hat you see on the Red Hat website is now doing, like any other site, is trying to incorporate its values into the product and sell it.

Where is
Red hat's "cronies"?


just as some big companies scramble to make "Red hat", they ignore the important value of open source, the open source banner that can lead to market trends.


in 2010, SugarCRM's homepage was a remarkable publicity for an open-source enterprise, and now it's not a word for open source.


Alfresco is currently the most widely used open source enterprise knowledge management system, as early as 2009, alfresco declared itself to be a "Enterprise content management system ECM Open source alternatives." "But it's hard to see the open source Word on its homepage now," he said.


Acquia is no exception, you can compare the Drupal company website between 2009 and 2013. Basically, most companies are selling their technology or software around open source projects.


you might say that these open-source companies are trickery's fake open source companies, not enough to prove anything. But here's about JBoss, the open-source effort that developers around the world are working on, and JBoss is a real open source company, and has been proud of open source until it was acquired by like-minded Red Hat in 2006. Despite being acquired by Red Hat, JBoss's website jboss.com has retained the open source brand. In May 2012, the site made a major renovation, but the main features of open source. But do you have a look at JBoss's homepage now, and the smell of open source?


This is not to criticize Red hat for cleaning up the open-source elements of its web site as well, which can only mean that it does not now use open source as the main goal of its marketing as before.


Open source is just a means, not an end


In fact, real open-source companies have used open source to make a full profit, and they don't have to pretend to be an open-source company like the fake Open-source companies. Twitter, Facebook and Google, for example, have made a lot of important contributions to open source, and have not been eager to get paid for selling open source software. The three companies appear to be the main differences from the Open-source companies mentioned above, because they focus on the value of their products, including proprietary software launched around open source.


Levine's main point of view is that "the combination of open source and service/device operations can have an amazing effect in the software industry", although this is well known, but not all companies can follow such an ideal idea to complete. I think that's the biggest reason why open source is too lazy to use open source as the main means of profitability, and it's not going to happen in recent years.


is right in the simplest sense, because there will never be a second Red hat with open source support as its main value. Perhaps the deeper point is that there will be more fake "Open-source companies" than Red Hat will continue to emerge. As the direction of development continues to change, open source will be the core value of more companies, so open source will no longer be the company's preferred target for profitability.