Identifying Successful Open Source Projects

As open source companies and projects enter a transition phase of funding, licensing, community participation, let’s look at the characteristics of successful open source projects. 

SHOW: 834

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #834 Transcript

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SHOW NOTES:

• 10 Years of Kubernetes
• 30 Years of Linux
• 10 Years of OpenStack
• 25 Years of Java

WHAT DOES SUCCESS MEAN IN OPEN SOURCE?

• There are 1000s of widely used open source projects, from Linux to Java to MySQL to Docker to Kubernetes to MongoDB
• Less projects are successful from a monetization perspective, but that’s about individual business models
• Plenty of companies during the 2010s-2020s treated open source as “marketing” and not really a development model

WHAT DOES COMMERCIAL SUCCESS LOOK LIKE IN OPEN SOURCE?

• Wide usage infrastructure - Linux, Kubernetes, OpenStack
• Complex projects vs. “it just works”
• Critical security - Vault
• Complex data services - MongoDB, Kafka
• Many companies contributing (share the costs) - Linux, Kubernetes
• Management / Observability Engines - Crossplane, Prometheus
• Programming Languages - Java, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, etc.
• Cloud services hiding complexity
• Cloud services stretching across clouds
• Single vendor projects - often move to non-OSS licensing
• Single vendor projects - difficult to maintain at scale

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