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Open source isn’t actually good for everybody, as @joabjackson explores today in The New Stack Update weekly newsletter. Here’s his analysis in the wake of the new @AWSOpen fork of Elastic
https://mailchi.mp/thenewstack/open-source-is-good-for-almost-everybody?e=1028cfdd1e
https://mailchi.mp/thenewstack/open-source-is-good-for-almost-everybody?e=1028cfdd1e
Last week, Elasticsearch was back in the news for switching its open source license to one markedly more restricted than the Apache license. It straight up restricts cloud service providers from offering @Elastic software as a service, via @rwwmike https://thenewstack.io/this-week-in-programming-elasticsearch-turns-aws-into-the-open-source-champion/
This, of course, led to Amazon’s fork of Elastic and has raised a lot of questions in the community about whether a true #opensource license can restrict what the software can and cannot be used for. But will Elastic be better off? Time will tell.
Completely incidentally, we ran across a number of similar stories this week that show how open source software can benefit users in multiple ways, while at the same time offering more ambiguous results for the companies that created the software.
Take Linksys, for example. The company found incredible success in the late 2000s by offering Wi-Fi routers for the emerging home market, and was acquired in 2003 by Cisco for half a billion dollars.
But when doing its due diligence, Cisco found that Linksys, by way of a hardware supplier, had violated that GPL open source license, by using Linux code in the WRT54G router without providing its modifications to that code for public access.
As a result, Cisco had to pay the Free Software Foundation @FSF a reparation fee. But more importantly, it had to release the source code, which sparked a whole generation of hardware hackers modding their WRT54Gs.
The WRT54G became such an icon in the open source community that Cisco offers it to this day, as TNS culture reporter @DavidCasselTNS pointed out in a post from last Sunday, “The Open Source Lesson of the Linksys WRT54G Router.” https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys-wrt54g-router/
CentOS also sparked a lot of joy in people, though it made its actual source, @RedHat, nervous. When it was created in 2003, CentOS was a clone of RHEL. Turns out a lot of people needed an enterprise-grade Linux distro, but couldn’t afford subscription fees for RHEL.
CentOS grew so popular it actually dwarfed RHEL usage, at least on the internet. Today, CentOS is the 3rd most widely used distro on the internet, powering 17.3% of all servers, according to W3Techs. It is far more pervasive than even RHEL itself, powering only 1.7% of all sites.
Over time @RedHat took control of the CentOS project, using it as a sales channel, though it allegedly still made Red Hat (and later IBM) marketing teams nervous, so, in December, they killed the distro in its current form.
Instead Red Hat upgraded @CentOSProject to be a cloud native distro, “CentOS Stream” with rolling updates. In effect, the rolling updates moved the project away from guaranteeing enterprise stability for its many users.
Now, one of the original creators of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer, is heading back to the drawing board, creating another free, open source clone of RHEL, called Rocky Linux. And he vows not to let this get gobbled up by corporate interests. https://thenewstack.io/post-centos-rocky-linux-fights-for-community-driven-enterprise-open-source/
To be fair, since mutating CentOS, Red Hat has introduced 2 new free editions of RHEL for small workloads. But these releases don’t address the considerable market that can’t afford, but still need, a rock-solid Linux distro.
Thanks to open source, enterprise computing is getting used by many more people around the world. But will Rocky Linux, out of Red Hat’s control, benefit Red Hat itself? Only time will tell.
