Do you know that the term
open source was invented in 1998 to replace the term free software? To highlight "free as in freedom, not free as in beer" 😀?Dylan Beattie presented the open source history and its current trends in the talk Open Source, Open Mind: The Cost of Free Software.
The history itself is very interesting: from pirating computer games, creating first linux distro to licenses evolution, CLAs and current number of limitations to use
open software. That part I recommend to watch once you have free time, it's really entertaining.But here I want to highlight the following:
🔸 Open source projects provide us a code. Not more. If you want continuity, support, availability, or convenience, expect to pay. It can be licenses, managed services, sponsorship or even your own investments.
🔸 "People who share the source code do not owe you anything". They don’t even promise the software works properly or it works at all.
🔸 Open source projects can change their license to commercial at any time. You should be just ready for that (remember Redis, Graylog, Vault, ElasticSearch, etc.).
Some example:
You can take postgres for free, it's fully open.
But can you use for production? Probably not 😯.
First you need to package it, prepare installation and upgrade procedures, implement HA, configure metrics and monitoring dashboards, provide backup approach, tune security, teach operations team, etc.
You can do it on your own or pay to another company to do it for you.
So anyone who says open source is free and it costs nothing has clearly never run it in production. Open source software is really "open" but not free.
#technologies