Is Cloud the End of Open Source?

As you may or may not be aware, I am not a proponent of open source. I won't belabor that here but you can get my perspective on the matter if you care. The issue I would like to explore today is, with the advent of the cloud, whether or not open source is effectively dead but just doesn't quite realize it yet. And yes, I'm serious.

Now, I realize that this concept of the invention of the cloud sounding the death knell of open source seemingly flies in the face of current facts and statistics on the matter considering how much open source software has been provisioned in the cloud. But that's existing open source software that was developed during the pre-cloud era. Today the world has fundamentally shifted and cloud harms and impedes open source in a number of different ways.

The first way that cloud hurts open source is that software as a service (SaaS) fundamentally changes the nature of the discussion from paying for a license to paying for a service. This may seem subtle but it is a major paradigm shift. Effectively, whether you use open source software or proprietary software you are still paying for it. This effectively eliminates the biggest draw open source has, that you can use it "for free".

Speaking of still paying for it, the commercial cloud also eviscerates the relative costs of commercial versus open source software. Consider that MongoDB (open source) and Azure Cosmos DB both offer a free tier in Microsoft Azure. However, running an unmanaged MongoDB Server in Azure will cost you about $22/month plus Azure infrastructure costs. A fully managed Azure Cosmos DB instance is an equivalent price at $23/month while a fully managed MongoDB (Atlas) instance costs $167.67/month. If all you care about is getting things done inexpensively and with the least hassle, the choice is obvious. The open source options cost far more than the proprietary ones.

If completely flipping the economics and payment paradigm are not enough, the cloud further damages open source by drying up funding avenues. Companies like RedHat and others found successful business models in offering support contracts while other open source vendors built offerings that offered their open source software as a service. But the large commercial cloud vendors like Microsoft are cutting into those revenue streams. Getting the software as a service from Microsoft and similar commercial cloud vendors effectively nullifies the need to pay for a support contract with the open source vendor.

The cloud has also forced open source software vendors to in effect eat their own words and choke on them. Open source never imagined or anticipated the cloud so their licensing actually allows commercial vendors to offer services built on top of their software for a fee. This fact is not lost on open source companies. MongoDB actually created a Server Side Public License (SSPL) that restricts others from creating a service that directly competes with MongoDB's SaaS offering. How "open source" is it then if it's SSPL isn't even approved by the OSI? Effectively, the cloud is forcing "open source" vendors to walk back their promises and stances regarding just how "free" their software really is. Unfortunately for them, since their software was open source without such restrictive licensing, all this accomplishes is a code fork and commercial vendors can do it anyway free of the SSPL and similar anti-open source licensing restrictions.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that by flipping the script on the economics, drying up funding avenues and forcing open source vendors to betray their own values; commercial cloud vendors like Microsoft, AWS and Google have effectively chopped the head off of the proverbial chicken and open source is now simply just running around in one last grand hurrah before eventually fading into the great beyond. Good riddance.