Are Large Cloud Providers a Threat To Open Source Vendors?

'Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk,
asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable
and damaging war with big cloud providers:

In the last twelve to eighteen months...a switch has been flipped.
Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google
or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful,
existential threat. The fear of these cloud providers has become so
overpowering, in fact, that commercial open source vendors have chosen
-- against counsel, in many cases -- to walk down strategic paths that
violate open source cultural norms, trigger massive and sustained
negative PR and jeopardize relationships with developers, partners and
customers. Specifically, commercial open source providers have
increasingly turned to models that blur the lines between open source
and proprietary software in an attempt to access the strengths of
both, with the higher probability outcome of ending up with their
weaknesses instead.

That commercial open source providers took these actions having been
advised of these and other risks in advance says everything about how
these businesses view their prospects in a world increasingly
dominated by massive providers of cloud infrastructure and an
expanding array of services that sit on top of that. The strategic
decisions inarguably have major, unavoidable negative consequences,
but commercial open source providers -- or their investors, at least
-- believe that a lack of action would be even more damaging.'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/03/16/0118259

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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