Ask HN: How will the OSS vs cloud battle end?

2 points by danielblazevski 7 years ago | 4 comments

More and more cloud providers like AWS and GCP seem to a threat to open source projects. AWS has managed Elasticsearch, Kafka, etc. GCP has managed Airflow, CockroachDB, etc.

How sustainable is it to have both (1) niche companies around a specific open source tool like a database and (2) cloud providers that maintain their own versions. I worry the future looks bleak for these niche companies, and subsequently for a lot of OSS.

Even now, what incentives do companies have to work with these niche companies vs just using AWS/GCP/Azure? Is it better service? cheaper? Is it easier to not be tied into a cloud provider?

Note: I'm focusing more on tooling like databases and such, not OSS projects like Linux or programming languages, which seem like a different ballgame.

[edit: previously mentioned the projects getting "wiped out", which is not true. I'm more concerned with unerstanding the actual competitive advantage these smaller companies have and how sustainable it is. ]

PaulHoule 7 years ago |

Is it the open source project Elasticsearch that you're worried about or the company?

For a long time I've been shocked about the large amount of venture money that goes to companies that are involved with trendy open source projects that just don't have a moat.

For instance I've heavily used Elasticsearch as have many other without ever paying money to Elasticsearch the company. Similarly, companies like Pivotal, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Continuum Analytics, etc. just seem to be a scam. So long as they are trendy some companies will think that they have to pay them money, until they realize that they don't.

danielblazevski 7 years ago | |

I would say both the company and the project. They seem to go hand-in-hand.

Their business model is to allow free access to a limited version of their product -- which admittedly is good enough for many to use in production.

And if these companies stop getting revenue for the premium product, then I worry it's goodbye to substantial progress on open source version.

QuinnyPig 7 years ago |

None of the projects you list have been “wiped out.”

danielblazevski 7 years ago | |

True - not wiped out. Just a bit lost as to what is the advantage of using one of the smaller companies' premium products vs AWS/GCP managed versions, and how sustainable that advantage is. I'll update the question.