The Death of Openness and Freedom?
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Yonkovit, Matt
2020 was a very bad year for most of us, under the shadow of all that was going on there was a troubling trend we all need to be aware of: the erosion of the classic open source model and values. For years vendors have been slowly chipping away at the freedom and openness provided by open source, this year saw unprecedented changes to how people view and value OSS. From licensing changes to as a service exclusive, what was open is no longer. Is this being driven solely by the cloud? or is this purely corporate greed and others viewing open Source as a successful business model to replicate? Let's not only discuss but bring to light the trouble trends that threaten open source projects and development as we know it. "[W]e didn't open source it to get help from the community, to make the product better. We open sourced as a freemium strategy; to drive adoption." - MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria. Open source was never designed or planned to be used as "Gateway Drug" to move people to a proprietary locked in software, but more and more this is happening. This is not just a MongoDB move; Elastic, Redis, and others have all used the "Cloud" as a convenient excuse to erode classic open source licenses and values. At the same time new "open source compatible" versions of popular projects like MySQL or PostgreSQL pop up on cloud providers platforms. It's like the game "Among Us" only with your open source projects. You never know who or what is really open until you dig deep.
 Hello, everyone. I'm here to talk a little bit about some trends in the open source space that I find troubling and that I think are making the open source industry move in ways that we had never intended. And they are things that trouble me a little bit. I'm worried about how open and how much collaboration and innovation are going to be happening over the next few years if these trends continue. And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that today. But I'm going to start with an introduction. My name's Matt. Matt Yankovic. I work for Percona. I am the head of open source strategy or the Haas, if you will, of Percona. I've been here for over 11 years. If you're not familiar with Percona, we offer open source database solutions, software and services. We've been doing that for quite a while. I have over 15 years in the FOSS space. I've worked with companies like Minus QLAB, Sun Micro Systems, Percona, no matter most. Most of my time has actually been in the DBA in this admin space. A lot of the backend infrastructure I have contributed to different projects over the years. And you can find my email here if you'd like to follow up, ask questions. I'm happy to get on a phone call, get on a Zoom, talk to you guys about this topic or other topics that might be near and dear to my heart. And you can also follow me on Twitter. So without further ado, let me kind of walk through my goal. Really what I'd like to have come out of this session is for all of us to understand this march towards commercialization in the open source space and what it's doing to us. You see, I think that what's happening is we are being pulled into a direction where money and shareholders are now ruling the roost. They're driving what people think open source should be. And I'm worried that the innovation and the collaboration that we all love in the open source space is at risk because of it. And so we're going to talk about those. We're going to talk about the dangers. We're going to talk about the reasons. And hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll get a full understanding of where I see things moving and then we can continue conversations after this on potentially how to fix it. So I want to start with something near and dear to my heart. See I am a child of the 80s. So I was born in 76. I grew up with Saturday morning cartoons. My favorite cartoon is actually over here is Transformers. And so Transformers was by far my favorite. In fact, Transformers came on at 7am on Saturday morning, which meant that every Saturday morning for several years, I was up at 6.30 to watch Transformers. Of course, I bought into all of the hype, including wanting all the toys. And I would just ask, can I have Transformers? Can I have Transformers? And of course, the one time of year when you can really kind of guarantee you're going to get some kind of toy generally is Christmas time. And so at Christmas, I bothered all my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, my mom, everybody about, you know what I want? You know what I want from Santa? You know what I want? I want Transformers, Transformers, Transformers, Transformers. And lo and behold, you get to Christmas morning. You're all set to go. You're all excited because you're going to go play with Optimus Prime. You're going to go get your star scream. It's going to be so exciting. And you go and you see all these presents and you're there with your cousins and you're all in the Christmasy mood. And you open up the presents and you're like, yes, no, wait a minute. What are those? They're GoBots. Of course, parents, grandparents, older people, a robot is a robot, right? No, GoBots are not Transformers. Oh my gosh. How can you get that wrong? But they did consistently for like three years and I don't understand it. But I'm going to educate you and I'm going to educate them maybe for those that are still around. Transformer versus GoBot. You see, on the right hand side, that is a Transformer. On the left hand side, that is a GoBot. Do you notice how different they are? Yes, they are different. One is pretty awesome. It's very sleek. It looks like something that I would want to play with. The other one looks like something that, well, frankly, was slapped together and tried to just manufacture to get some money because GoBots were kind of the cheap knockoff of what Transformers were. Let's be honest, or Transformers were the better version. Let's put it that way. I don't want the shittier Transformer. I want the Transformer. A lot of times in the open source space, what you see is we want the Transformer experience but we end up with the GoBot. Sometimes that's caused by decisions that are outside of our control. Sometimes that's caused by companies because success, you see, brings imitators. It's not just here. Let's talk about one of the most successful, awesomest movies of my childhood, probably your favorite as well, Star Wars. Who doesn't love Star Wars? See Star Wars was one of the most successful franchises in the history of movies. It spawned what, is it 11 movies now? Countless TV shows? How many toys? I mean, oh my God. Star Wars was the bomb. And because it was so successful, you saw imitators. Now some imitators were obvious imitators. So I don't know if anybody has heard of Turkish Star Wars. Oh, Turkish Star Wars. It is by far a horribly cheesy, horrible production value knockoff of Star Wars. But it's so bad it actually transcends. No one, however, is going to mistake Turkish Star Wars for Star Wars. And similarly, when you have the knockoff, so you have something that imitates, you can kind of tell when it's of subpar quality. The problem is sometimes companies and franchises will actually take something that was so instrumental, so awesome, so awe-inspiring. And they'll try and make it better because they're chasing additional dollars, additional fans, additional reach. And then you get stuff like, you know, you know, you know, you know, this guy right back there, Jar Jar Banks, which probably was the worst invention Star Wars ever had. And when you think about it, you have open source companies who start off as that Star Wars on the galactic trajectory to awesomeness and people love it. And then they start doing things that make you think like, man, they really Jar Jar'd that. And this happens all the time as we try and improve things because everybody wants to imitate the winner and they want to win more. And Steven Spielberg famously said, everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner. And that's true because you see companies get jealous of other people who are successful. You see people who sit there and say, man, I developed that software. They stole it. They're using it to make more money than I am. Or how much money can I make if they actually paid me more? And so you get this friction and this infighting and you have companies that get jealous. And you know, let's look at an example in the real world, which is Microsoft. Microsoft's a classic example of this. Microsoft called Linux a cancer. They hated open source. I think Balmer was the enemy of open source for years and years and years. And in fact, today, there's probably many people who are watching this that still hold ill will towards Microsoft. But where's Microsoft now? Woohoo! They love a winner too. Everything that you see on Microsoft's website is about Linux, open source, and they have done a lot to contribute to sponsoring events, to coming and sending people to events on open source to talk. They've contributed things back to the open source community. They've started to move their software into the open source space. They've done a ton. And it's kind of like they've just said, oops, my bad, let's go ahead and let's start this over because everyone loves a winner. And what you start to realize, especially as you move to this as a service space, open source is the great enabler of that. Open source is what has driven things like Azure, AWS, all these other cloud providers, all these other as a service. If you think about the early days of the web, you wouldn't have the Facebooks or the Twitter's or the LinkedIn's or the Amazon's or several other companies unless there was open source out there. And that's something that we have to be mindful of, that open source has driven more innovation than probably any technology in the last 10 to 15 years. And that's a good thing. But we're entering a dangerous time for open source because it has won so much. It has become such a standard. Now we're starting to see the imitators. We're starting to see the people who aren't true open source believers or don't follow an open source philosophy who are in it for less than stellar reasons. They're in it for the money. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about the business side here. So bear with me for five to 10 minutes here when I talk through this. My question to you is as a community, as a project maintainer, a creator, what does your definition of success look like? Because I guarantee it's probably going to be different than those of investors and those of people who are running a lot of open source companies. And it's that difference that I think is starting to cause a wedge in the community. If you think about this, ask yourself as an individual, when you first started using or contributing or learning about open source, why did you do it? Did you do it to become rich? Did you do it because it was a better way to do things? Did you do it because it made your job easier? Because you believed in it. You loved it. You wanted to contribute back. You wanted to make the world a better place. How you answer that question is going to dictate how you view this topic and where you think that the industry is going. Because the answer to one will then shade all the others. And let me say this. Above all, open source as a business is hard. Open source is not a business model, but a lot of people adopt it as a business model. It is the foundation for their business model. It is the enabler of their business model. And why is open source hard? There's a few reasons. First, let me throw out a couple of statistics for you. You might not know, we did an open source survey where we surveyed the database community and I think this is relevant across all spaces. Two thirds of companies using open source said they prefer to not pay for enterprise version or a support contract or anything. They just want to use the free community version, build their applications off of it. They'll self support. They'll go out and find someone if they need to later on. You're not going to worry about it. So a large portion of the user base in the community is predisposed to not purchase. That makes it really hard for companies to make a go of it. And I know many companies or many individuals who have tried to build their project into an open source company and tried to basically build a career off of it and have had struggles because it's hard to find people who will donate or contribute. And this is part of the reason why. There's a lot of people who want to use, want to maybe contribute back stuff in the free space, but they're just not willing to pay. And they want to innovate. They want to move quick. Now, of the third who will pay, most are focused on buying it or using it for support type reasons or insurance. Insurance is great, except insurance is the only thing most people pay for that they never want to use. How many people here want to use their life insurance? Nobody does. Nobody wants to use life insurance because that's a really bad outcome for you if you have to use your life insurance. Actually, it would be your relatives using your life insurance. But when you look at that with a support or insurance, the mindset is unless I'm opening tickets, unless I'm having problems, is the value there. And so if you get to a point where your systems are fairly stable, a lot of people will say, I don't need support. I'll just go hire a consultant if I need it. I'll go to the community and get that help. And that makes this model very difficult for a lot of folks. And the retention rate for that service generally is lower than proprietary because you're not locked in. You're forced to. You have options. So as a company, you have to provide immense value and you have to continually better yourself and give more to the community. It is about giving more. And if you do, you can be very successful from a business perspective, but it is a constant. What have you done for me lately? How do we get better? How do we provide more value? How do we show customers that we're partners? How do we make this work together? And if you don't, it's very easy for people to fork or to replace features that you have. And that's the downside, but also the vast beauty of open source because it forces projects, it forces innovation, it forces people to get better. And that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's just a hard business model. And when you talk about business models, okay, from a business perspective, executives and investors, they want stickiness. In fact, if you work for an open source company, I guarantee you that your executive team has probably had a conversation at least once a month that has included how do we increase stickiness? It's a conversation that happens all the time. And if you don't know what stickiness is, stickiness is how do we get people to use our software, keep using it, and pay for our software and keep paying for it? And there's a fine line between that and lock-in, okay? Because we want stickiness, but lock-in is bad. So is stickiness, as a whole, isn't necessarily bad? So stickiness, if you generate immense loyalty with your community and with your paying customer base, that's a great thing. Because if they have loyalty to you and you're treating them right and they're doing it because they find value and it is a symbiotic relationship, that's wonderful. There's nothing wrong with that. And if you can do more of it, more power to you. But if your stickiness is predicated on locking someone in and preventing them from easily moving or changing providers, that can be really bad. The question is, and you can ask yourself this, is how easy is it for you? How easy is it for you to move if someone raises your rates? Or if someone doesn't give you the level of support or doesn't keep up with patches or has security issues? If any one of these issues comes up and you're getting a bad experience, how difficult would it be for you to switch providers? Is it an absolutely we couldn't? Is it a multi-year project? Is it a couple months? Is it a couple weeks? And the answer to that question typically will tell you how locked in you are. And when we look at that stickiness factor, it's not all bad, right? Let me give you a really good example from history. MySQL. So MySQL had a retention problem early on before they got bought by Sun, before they got bought by Oracle. MySQL had lower renewal rates than they wanted and that is expected in the industry because what would happen is someone would run into a problem. Oh my God, my database is down. I need help with MySQL and then MySQL would sell them a support contract. So MySQL Enterprise, they would get the answers to the questions, never use the software or the support again. Renewal would come along and they'd be like, yeah, we don't need it. We just needed it for that one time. So the value that the customers were getting out of MySQL Enterprise was very transient. So MySQL introduced the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and actually increased the renewal rate and the stickiness, if you will, of their customer base. Not necessarily a bad thing. The thing with MySQL Enterprise Monitor was it wasn't something that you couldn't do yourself. You could totally monitor and manage everything in your MySQL space. They just made it easier. They made it so you didn't have to have that expertise if you didn't have it. So they made something that was replaceable but it provided a really important value add to the MySQL ecosystem. And there were companies who bought MySQL Enterprise just so they could have the Enterprise Monitor and that really improved the quote-unquote stickiness for them. And as we talk about different open source models, realize where these type of things fit in and a lot of these are driven by the stickiness factor. So the most popular models, a lot of models and a lot of companies start with this pure services model. And when we talk about pure services, this is where you release open source, whether it's GPL, whether it's MIT, whether it's BSG license, whatever license it is, and you're not selling subscriptions to the software, you're selling services. Whether that's support, consulting, managed service, whatever, this particular model is really easy to start with. It is 100% people powered. But what people power means is it doesn't have a lot of profitability. You have pay salaries and you can only sell what you have capacity to deliver. There's all kinds of challenges with this model. Retention and expansion can be harder because you have to continually prove the expertise and have the expertise available. So this is a challenging model. And this is where you can be successful here, but you have to continually show that you're the best. And the best will always have a place. But investors don't like this model that much because it doesn't have the stickiness of other models. And so the stickiness model that kind of became the prevalent model for quite some years has been the open core. And open core has evolved greatly over the time period of open source. And if you're not familiar with open core, this is where you reserve features for paying customers. You have a community version and you have an enterprise version. And in the enterprise version, you have many features that aren't available to the open source space that aren't necessarily open source. And if you want to take advantage of any of those features, or if they're required, you have to pay. This has some value to some customers if they're using those features. It does have medium stickiness because what happens is people in the open source space will develop open source alternatives. So classically, companies start to move more and more features that are required for operations to a closed source enterprise solution. So you might have an open core version that, hey, if you want to back up your database, or you want to back it up hot, you have to pay us. Well, doesn't everybody have to back up their database? That seems kind of bad. That seems like something that the open source community would be like, well, I want to use your product. I just don't want to pay for just a backup tool. So someone will develop a backup tool. So this model is very susceptible to disruption. And so you'll see companies be able to replace some of those enterprise features with open source versions of them. That happens all the time. But more so than that, what you're seeing with this open core version is it's starting to be replaced, right? Because you've got this awesome enterprise version, and now people are starting to develop alternatives to it. They're starting to move them into what is kind of the new hotness for everybody, which is the as a service model. You can't move five feet without seeing something about infrastructure as a service, cloud providers, databases as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. If you're developing applications, it's probably being built as a service, and you're probably building it off of open source. And this is where it provides a really high level of stickiness, because it's about you giving up control to a vendor. You're outsourcing the entire functionality for that particular function, whether it's software, it could be business software, it could be infrastructure, and you're giving it to someone else to maintain own and control. And that does lead to a lot of lock in in a lot of cases, because it's really, really difficult to move from one provider to another in a lot of these cases, because you don't have that open standard. That's why things like Kubernetes have become very popular, because you can go multi-cloud and you can more easily move things between infrastructures. But when you talk about that as a service model, there's that tradeoff. You give up control for ease of use. And that is something that a lot of companies and a lot of individuals are willing to do. And so that's something to be mindful of. So this has a high level of stickiness. This is where a lot of things are moving towards, but this also has a massive amount of lock in. So it's something to be mindful of. Now the final model that I'll talk about is what I call the cyborg Robocop or hybrid model, trying to merge all of those other models together. Some people call this tech-enabled services. Think of this where you give away your open source software for free. You make sure that if it is required to run all the operations, it's out there in the open space. But you might have value added services. You might have AI components. You might have other things that are part of a subscription. And so it's not that you don't necessarily need those things. You can do them on your own. But you're paying for the efficiency or the value that enables you to move faster. And so we're starting to see that, and this is more of a DIY, if you will. So you control your fate. And so that's something that we're seeing out in the space now as well. Now let's talk specifically on commercial open source, because this is where it gets really interesting and this is where the risk factor comes in. So I've kind of talked about the different models. Now let's talk specifically about commercial open source. So if you're going out there to build a company that is an open source company, who are you building your company for? Are you building it for the world? Are you trying to make the world a better place? Are you trying to enable people to do things that they could never do before and revolutionize some part of the industry? Could be. It could also be that you're really focused on a specific community. You might find that your niche is enabling a very specific community to do something better. Could be web developers. Could be veterinarians. It could be people who are developing Go or Python. It doesn't matter. Are you building this to enrich the community, to make more people more effective? It's a good question. Or maybe you're just trying to enhance the users of a particular software. Maybe you are fans of MySQL and want to build a MySQL tool that is going to help all the users of MySQL do something better, more efficient. It's a good way to get in there. Or are you really focused just on the shareholder value? And this is the one that most companies that are in the open source space that are the darlings of Silicon Valley are chasing. It's shareholder value first, shareholder value second, shareholder value third. And this started with the original OG. I mentioned MySQL a few times. When some bought MySQL for a billion dollars. Everyone looked at that as a moment that open source as a business model had arrived. Open source is a legitimate business model. It's right there in the headline. And what that did was it made investors go, whoa, I want a billion dollars too. So they started looking at open source companies in a different light. And the thing that they saw was, wow, look at some of these companies and the reach that they get, the downloads, the users. Oh my, look at how many people will use open source software. Wow. But it's not that they thought, wow, look at how great they're affecting the world, changing the world, making it a better place. Look how they're servicing the community. No, no, no, no. What they saw was, wow, I can monetize that. I can make that worth more money. And the owners or the people who have that open source project right now, you know what? They don't understand business. I do. I'm going to take my business knowledge. I'm going to apply it to your open source model and we're going to become filthy rich. And if you look at open source now, and this is from a couple of years ago, open source is the rule, right? I have talked to investors before who have said they really only want to invest in open source companies. They've talked to people who were going to go proprietary and they're like, you need to be either SaaS or open source, depends on what you're going to do. And here you see that, you know, two years ago, two dozen venture firms that invest a lot in open source. That's even more now. It's even higher. And you know, it's interesting because even they recognize, you know what? Open source really isn't a business model. It's a development model. And I think that the mindset of these investors, however, shows you how some of the open source companies have evolved. Look at this quote by Gary Little from Canva Ventures. Open source works for adoption purposes, but is poor for monetization. Of course, this is all about monetization. That's your monetizing at different levels. So how do we monetize outside of just open source? And that's where you have to think about, oh, what do we bolt on top of the open source project to make this better? And then Jocelyn Goldfein actually says, the beauty of an open source from an investor's perspective is disruption, not innovation. Don't care about innovation. Don't care about, you know, new contributions, but it's the contribution to marketing, not research and development. Don't care about new features. They care about reach. They care about how many people are using the software. And this is a very proprietary way of thinking, right? So if you think about like classic businesses, businesses want more market share. They want to sell more and they want to continue to sell into that audience and get them to be sticky and lock them in. If you look at the commercial open source space, I went and took five commercial open source database companies and looked at where their executives had previously worked. Okay? This is a list. Now, take a look at the list. You notice something missing. There's not a lot of open source pedigree here. You might argue that Sun or Google has some open source background, but they're not open source companies. They do some open source, yes, but they're not open source companies in the pure sense. And those are only a total of four of these companies that are in here out of 40 to 50 executives. You see Oracle, VMware, LinkedIn, BMC, Informatica, Symantec, New Relic, IBM, Cisco. These are not companies and these are not people who have an experience in that open source space. So they're approaching this from a pure business model perspective and they're going to bring, they're going to bring the 90s and 2000 Oracle to the open source space. And that scares the hell out of me and it should scare the hell out of you. And these are the people who the investors really want in these companies because these are proven companies that have made money. You don't take my word for it. Let's talk to or listen to what the CEO of MongoDB said. We didn't open source MongoDB to get help from the community or to make the product better. We open sourced it as a freemium model to drive adoption. They don't care about contributions, they don't care about innovation, they want adoption so they can try and monetize that. And the analysts in the financial analysts, they love that. In fact, here's a financial analyst, Billy Dubberstein. He actually says that open source, especially this is database open source, this is MongoDB, this is good where MongoDB is because if a company wants to switch vendors, it would have to lift all that data from the old database inserted into a new one. That's not only a huge pain, it's also terribly risky should any data get lost. Therefore, most companies tend to stick to their database vendor over time, even if that vendor raises prices. That's how Oracle became a tech powerhouse through the 90s. So analysts want MongoDB to become the next Oracle. That's bad. I don't know if you remember Oracle in the 90s, but they were not a fun company. And it's that lock in, that's the goal. And that's where we're starting to see the pressure for these commercial open source companies. How do we lock people in? How do we move away from pure open? And let's trick people into moving to this as a service and we'll start moving our features to as a service only and they'll never be released to open source. Woo-hoo! That'll be awesome. But the problem is, right now, open source companies are growing, but they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Take a look at the revenue numbers. So MongoDB from 267 million to 422 million, Elastic 272 to 428 million. Income for these. So this is the profitability, if you will. So Mongo, 422 million, but they lost 197 million. So they spent 197 million more than they made. And you look at this and you're not seeing the profitability with these companies. So they are struggling and they're getting immense pressure to figure out how to protect the revenue they have and grow it substantially because they're following a very classic NoSQL model. Just like NoSQL has eventual consistency, we have eventual profitability in the open source space right now, which is a horrible model from a business perspective, but we keep on trying it. And this means that we have this rapid cycling of different ideas and different things that erode what is classically open source. And if you don't believe me, look at the licensing whack-a-mole that has been going on recently in the open source space. Right? GPL forces you to contribute if you distribute the code. Okay. Well, do you distribute the code with the cloud? No, not really. Okay, let's do AGPL and let's do more open core because that way we can not have the cloud disrupt us so much or we can control more. Oh, databases in SAS is growing so SSPL because we want to go anti-cloud because we want to control our own cloud and we should be the only ones who control what our software does and who makes money off of our software. And so this is about control and investors, not about the community and not about getting better. Now, there are examples in the OSS space, the open source space, on both sides, good and bad. Let's take one example because a stalwart between of open source and someone who has repeatedly said they're committed to open source, Elastic is a great example of the open source spirit nowadays. They had to change to open core, okay, they went to AGPL, but look, they guaranteed a couple of years ago that they're never going to change away from the licensing scheme that they have. They keep this open source. What? What? Oh, oh, wait a minute. What do you mean? Oh, well, okay. They promised for about a year and a half that they would do it and they stuck within the year and a half to keeping it open, but evidently forever is a year and a half in Elastic time because now, guess what? They're restricted again. Let's look at Elastic as an example. I like this headline down here because I talked about monetizing the cloud, right? If we look right there, Elastic changed open source license to monetize because that's what this is all about. Let's look at why they changed. They came out with a blog and they were like, oh, AWS, not cool, not cool, but they changed for a couple of reasons. They said, number one, trademark violations. Number two, very serious accusation that people copied their proprietary code, decompiled binaries, and then copied the code and then contributed it back to open source projects. So IP theft, intentionally misleading customers, and just not plain nice. You're not plain nice. Those are some fairly serious accusations. If we look at the history of Elastic here, Elastic was fairly open pre-2008. And then as the pressure mounted to continue their growth, they doubled down on open by going open core and by using AGPL, which then made AWS respond by saying, hey, we have these packages that we don't want in the proprietary versions, that we don't want to necessarily follow the same restrictions that you have. So we're going to do the open distro and get our stuff in, and we're going to release that as open, which then Elastic responds, we're going to sue you. And we're going to sue a company called Search Guard, who they claim stole their software. And so then as that works its way through the court system, still under litigation, now Elastic decides, well, we're going to go SSPL and we are no longer open source. So thank you very much, 1600 contributors. Thank you for all of your help, community. We don't need your help anymore. If you'd like to contribute to our proprietary code base, yeah, we might accept it. That's not cool. It really isn't. And you look at these types of statements, right? You look at the statement up here that they're willing, that they're never going to change, and then they change. Can you really trust vendors to not chase the dollars? Can you really trust them to stay on their laurels? To stay true to what they've promised us? And the answer is no. This is not about cloud disruption. Companies are making money. They're not profitable because they have bad business models. Because open source isn't a business model. You need to figure out how to monetize that. You need to figure out how to make it work. But they've decided to follow a path of we need massive growth year over year so we can increase shareholder value and continue to do that. They're burning community bridges as they do that. And this is not about cloud. This is about control money and exit plans. And you look at some of these other things when you talk about infringing code, you can look at the court case here. There's examples. These are very serious accusations because it's not okay to just copy commercial code and release it as open source. That's bad. But I think there's a difference that we have to understand that there's a difference between inspired by and infringed on. I don't know what it is. They're litigating. I'm not a lawyer. But when we talk about inspired by, I can as an open source user look at proprietary code or a proprietary product and say, you know what, I think I can build a better backup solution. I can build a better monitoring solution. I'm going to. I'm going to build an open source version. You can't copy code, but you can be inspired by the other systems. And you know, there's a clear line when you talk about this. For instance, Oracle, Oracle, we'll, you know, you can contribute code to a lot of open source project at Oracle. And in the past, and I think it changes a little bit, they would actually rewrite contributions so they could establish clear ownership of IP because they wanted to de-risk themselves from potentially, you know, getting that finger pointed back at them. But you can still have inspired by code in the open source space and it's okay. And that's part of the disruption. And if that goes away, we've got a big problem. Trademarks, you have to abide by trademarks. Of course, all open source companies want you to follow the trademark rules. Each one has their own, but there's special rules, right? Some things you can do, some things you can't. And so there's that fine line there as well. Now, specifically when we talk about the SSPL, there's a few challenges that really worry me and concern me. First is SSPL is really designed to restrict your usage in a SAS database as a service environment. The language is written in a relatively vague way that you have to follow what they provide in FAQs to really guide you on what's acceptable and isn't. And it's very open to interpretation. So right now it's no databases as a service, but maybe in the future they might say, well, you're going to spin up 100 databases in your data center to support your one SAS application because you're using maybe Kubernetes. Now you're going to have to pay all 100 because you're violating the SSPL if you're not using the quote unquote enterprise version because guess what? That's a service. It's a little bit of a gray area. And that worries me because open source is special because of community collaboration, freedom, innovation, and quality. You can't innovate. You can't innovate there. And you're putting limits on the community by adopting some of these shareholder first practices. And people are going to start thinking that that's the normal. And this is where the big danger comes in. People are using open source, the name, and it's being hijacked to mean something completely different. Contributors are being treated poorly and they're being treated as second class citizens because guess what? We're not doing this because we want contributors. We don't want community. We want adoption. We want money. We want monetization. And now the next generation of developers who are going to develop the next generation of code for us are thinking this is the new normal. And that's just wrong because that, again, is going to stifle the innovation that we have. And as long as there's money to be made or there's money left on the table, these companies are going to continue to change and monkey and restrict things. And that's going to hurt everyone. And as soon as they stop making money, guess what? They're going to ditch this and they're going to slander all of us because they're going to say, oh my God, open source, you can't make money off that. It's not a real thing anymore. This new thing, it's only as a service, it's never going to be open source. Whatever they're going to say, because if you can't make money off of it, they're going to start giving it a bad name. And so that's going to be something we need to overcome because that all hurts the ability to innovate. Because if you can only innovate if you own the code, that's a bad position to be in. Think of it like this, Lucine. If Lucine was SSPL, Elastic would not exist today. Why can Elastic then take what they built off of Lucine and then make it SSPL and claim that it's going to have the same level of innovation? And I'll leave you with this thought. There's a Cherokee proverb that talks about the battle of two wolves inside all of us. One is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, and fury, or ego. The other one is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth. Who wins? Whichever one you feed. Who are we going to feed here? Shareholder value first or the betterment of the community? Whichever one we spend more time in, whichever one we focus more on, that's the one that's going to win. And we need to make sure it's the right one. Thank you.
 Hello, everyone.  I'm here to talk a little bit about some trends in the open source space that I find troubling  and that I think are making the open source industry move in ways that we had never intended.  And they are things that trouble me a little bit.  I'm worried about how open and how much collaboration and innovation are going to be happening over  the next few years if these trends continue.  And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that today.  But I'm going to start with an introduction.  My name's Matt.  Matt Yankovic.  I work for Percona.  I am the head of open source strategy or the Haas, if you will, of Percona.  I've been here for over 11 years.  If you're not familiar with Percona, we offer open source database solutions, software and  services.  We've been doing that for quite a while.  I have over 15 years in the FOSS space.  I've worked with companies like Minus QLAB, Sun Micro Systems, Percona, no matter most.  Most of my time has actually been in the DBA in this admin space.  A lot of the backend infrastructure I have contributed to different projects over the  years.  And you can find my email here if you'd like to follow up, ask questions.  I'm happy to get on a phone call, get on a Zoom, talk to you guys about this topic or  other topics that might be near and dear to my heart.  And you can also follow me on Twitter.  So without further ado, let me kind of walk through my goal.  Really what I'd like to have come out of this session is for all of us to understand this  march towards commercialization in the open source space and what it's doing to us.  You see, I think that what's happening is we are being pulled into a direction where  money and shareholders are now ruling the roost.  They're driving what people think open source should be.  And I'm worried that the innovation and the collaboration that we all love in the open  source space is at risk because of it.  And so we're going to talk about those.  We're going to talk about the dangers.  We're going to talk about the reasons.  And hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll get a full understanding of where I see things  moving and then we can continue conversations after this on potentially how to fix it.  So I want to start with something near and dear to my heart.  See I am a child of the 80s.  So I was born in 76.  I grew up with Saturday morning cartoons.  My favorite cartoon is actually over here is Transformers.  And so Transformers was by far my favorite.  In fact, Transformers came on at 7am on Saturday morning, which meant that every Saturday morning  for several years, I was up at 6.30 to watch Transformers.  Of course, I bought into all of the hype, including wanting all the toys.  And I would just ask, can I have Transformers?  Can I have Transformers?  And of course, the one time of year when you can really kind of guarantee you're going  to get some kind of toy generally is Christmas time.  And so at Christmas, I bothered all my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, my mom, everybody  about, you know what I want?  You know what I want from Santa?  You know what I want?  I want Transformers, Transformers, Transformers, Transformers.  And lo and behold, you get to Christmas morning.  You're all set to go.  You're all excited because you're going to go play with Optimus Prime.  You're going to go get your star scream.  It's going to be so exciting.  And you go and you see all these presents and you're there with your cousins and you're  all in the Christmasy mood.  And you open up the presents and you're like, yes, no, wait a minute.  What are those?  They're GoBots.  Of course, parents, grandparents, older people, a robot is a robot, right?  No, GoBots are not Transformers.  Oh my gosh.  How can you get that wrong?  But they did consistently for like three years and I don't understand it.  But I'm going to educate you and I'm going to educate them maybe for those that are still  around.  Transformer versus GoBot.  You see, on the right hand side, that is a Transformer.  On the left hand side, that is a GoBot.  Do you notice how different they are?  Yes, they are different.  One is pretty awesome.  It's very sleek.  It looks like something that I would want to play with.  The other one looks like something that, well, frankly, was slapped together and tried to  just manufacture to get some money because GoBots were kind of the cheap knockoff of what  Transformers were.  Let's be honest, or Transformers were the better version.  Let's put it that way.  I don't want the shittier Transformer.  I want the Transformer.  A lot of times in the open source space, what you see is we want the Transformer experience  but we end up with the GoBot.  Sometimes that's caused by decisions that are outside of our control.  Sometimes that's caused by companies because success, you see, brings imitators.  It's not just here.  Let's talk about one of the most successful, awesomest movies of my childhood, probably  your favorite as well, Star Wars.  Who doesn't love Star Wars?  See Star Wars was one of the most successful franchises in the history of movies.  It spawned what, is it 11 movies now?  Countless TV shows?  How many toys?  I mean, oh my God.  Star Wars was the bomb.  And because it was so successful, you saw imitators.  Now some imitators were obvious imitators.  So I don't know if anybody has heard of Turkish Star Wars.  Oh, Turkish Star Wars.  It is by far a horribly cheesy, horrible production value knockoff of Star Wars.  But it's so bad it actually transcends.  No one, however, is going to mistake Turkish Star Wars for Star Wars.  And similarly, when you have the knockoff, so you have something that imitates, you can  kind of tell when it's of subpar quality.  The problem is sometimes companies and franchises will actually take something that was so instrumental,  so awesome, so awe-inspiring.  And they'll try and make it better because they're chasing additional dollars, additional  fans, additional reach.  And then you get stuff like, you know, you know, you know, you know, this guy right back  there, Jar Jar Banks, which probably was the worst invention Star Wars ever had.  And when you think about it, you have open source companies who start off as that Star  Wars on the galactic trajectory to awesomeness and people love it.  And then they start doing things that make you think like, man, they really Jar Jar'd  that.  And this happens all the time as we try and improve things because everybody wants to  imitate the winner and they want to win more.  And Steven Spielberg famously said, everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.  And that's true because you see companies get jealous of other people who are successful.  You see people who sit there and say, man, I developed that software.  They stole it.  They're using it to make more money than I am.  Or how much money can I make if they actually paid me more?  And so you get this friction and this infighting and you have companies that get jealous.  And you know, let's look at an example in the real world, which is Microsoft.  Microsoft's a classic example of this.  Microsoft called Linux a cancer.  They hated open source.  I think Balmer was the enemy of open source for years and years and years.  And in fact, today, there's probably many people who are watching this that still hold  ill will towards Microsoft.  But where's Microsoft now?  Woohoo!  They love a winner too.  Everything that you see on Microsoft's website is about Linux, open source, and they have  done a lot to contribute to sponsoring events, to coming and sending people to events on  open source to talk.  They've contributed things back to the open source community.  They've started to move their software into the open source space.  They've done a ton.  And it's kind of like they've just said, oops, my bad, let's go ahead and let's start this  over because everyone loves a winner.  And what you start to realize, especially as you move to this as a service space, open  source is the great enabler of that.  Open source is what has driven things like Azure, AWS, all these other cloud providers,  all these other as a service.  If you think about the early days of the web, you wouldn't have the Facebooks or the Twitter's  or the LinkedIn's or the Amazon's or several other companies unless there was open source  out there.  And that's something that we have to be mindful of, that open source has driven more innovation  than probably any technology in the last 10 to 15 years.  And that's a good thing.  But we're entering a dangerous time for open source because it has won so much.  It has become such a standard.  Now we're starting to see the imitators.  We're starting to see the people who aren't true open source believers or don't follow  an open source philosophy who are in it for less than stellar reasons.  They're in it for the money.  And so I'm going to talk a little bit about the business side here.  So bear with me for five to 10 minutes here when I talk through this.  My question to you is as a community, as a project maintainer, a creator, what does  your definition of success look like?  Because I guarantee it's probably going to be different than those of investors and those  of people who are running a lot of open source companies.  And it's that difference that I think is starting to cause a wedge in the community.  If you think about this, ask yourself as an individual, when you first started using or  contributing or learning about open source, why did you do it?  Did you do it to become rich?  Did you do it because it was a better way to do things?  Did you do it because it made your job easier?  Because you believed in it.  You loved it.  You wanted to contribute back.  You wanted to make the world a better place.  How you answer that question is going to dictate how you view this topic and where you think  that the industry is going.  Because the answer to one will then shade all the others.  And let me say this.  Above all, open source as a business is hard.  Open source is not a business model, but a lot of people adopt it as a business model.  It is the foundation for their business model.  It is the enabler of their business model.  And why is open source hard?  There's a few reasons.  First, let me throw out a couple of statistics for you.  You might not know, we did an open source survey where we surveyed the database community  and I think this is relevant across all spaces.  Two thirds of companies using open source said they prefer to not pay for enterprise  version or a support contract or anything.  They just want to use the free community version, build their applications off of it.  They'll self support.  They'll go out and find someone if they need to later on.  You're not going to worry about it.  So a large portion of the user base in the community is predisposed to not purchase.  That makes it really hard for companies to make a go of it.  And I know many companies or many individuals who have tried to build their project into  an open source company and tried to basically build a career off of it and have had struggles  because it's hard to find people who will donate or contribute.  And this is part of the reason why.  There's a lot of people who want to use, want to maybe contribute back stuff in the free  space, but they're just not willing to pay.  And they want to innovate.  They want to move quick.  Now, of the third who will pay, most are focused on buying it or using it for support type  reasons or insurance.  Insurance is great, except insurance is the only thing most people pay for that they never  want to use.  How many people here want to use their life insurance?  Nobody does.  Nobody wants to use life insurance because that's a really bad outcome for you if you  have to use your life insurance.  Actually, it would be your relatives using your life insurance.  But when you look at that with a support or insurance, the mindset is unless I'm opening  tickets, unless I'm having problems, is the value there.  And so if you get to a point where your systems are fairly stable, a lot of people will say,  I don't need support.  I'll just go hire a consultant if I need it.  I'll go to the community and get that help.  And that makes this model very difficult for a lot of folks.  And the retention rate for that service generally is lower than proprietary because you're not  locked in.  You're forced to.  You have options.  So as a company, you have to provide immense value and you have to continually better yourself  and give more to the community.  It is about giving more.  And if you do, you can be very successful from a business perspective, but it is a constant.  What have you done for me lately?  How do we get better?  How do we provide more value?  How do we show customers that we're partners?  How do we make this work together?  And if you don't, it's very easy for people to fork or to replace features that you have.  And that's the downside, but also the vast beauty of open source because it forces projects,  it forces innovation, it forces people to get better.  And that's a good thing.  It's not a bad thing.  It's just a hard business model.  And when you talk about business models, okay, from a business perspective, executives and  investors, they want stickiness.  In fact, if you work for an open source company, I guarantee you that your executive team has  probably had a conversation at least once a month that has included how do we increase  stickiness?  It's a conversation that happens all the time.  And if you don't know what stickiness is, stickiness is how do we get people to use  our software, keep using it, and pay for our software and keep paying for it?  And there's a fine line between that and lock-in, okay?  Because we want stickiness, but lock-in is bad.  So is stickiness, as a whole, isn't necessarily bad?  So stickiness, if you generate immense loyalty with your community and with your paying customer  base, that's a great thing.  Because if they have loyalty to you and you're treating them right and they're doing it because  they find value and it is a symbiotic relationship, that's wonderful.  There's nothing wrong with that.  And if you can do more of it, more power to you.  But if your stickiness is predicated on locking someone in and preventing them from easily  moving or changing providers, that can be really bad.  The question is, and you can ask yourself this, is how easy is it for you?  How easy is it for you to move if someone raises your rates?  Or if someone doesn't give you the level of support or doesn't keep up with patches or  has security issues?  If any one of these issues comes up and you're getting a bad experience, how difficult would  it be for you to switch providers?  Is it an absolutely we couldn't?  Is it a multi-year project?  Is it a couple months?  Is it a couple weeks?  And the answer to that question typically will tell you how locked in you are.  And when we look at that stickiness factor, it's not all bad, right?  Let me give you a really good example from history.  MySQL.  So MySQL had a retention problem early on before they got bought by Sun, before they  got bought by Oracle.  MySQL had lower renewal rates than they wanted and that is expected in the industry because  what would happen is someone would run into a problem.  Oh my God, my database is down.  I need help with MySQL and then MySQL would sell them a support contract.  So MySQL Enterprise, they would get the answers to the questions, never use the software or  the support again.  Renewal would come along and they'd be like, yeah, we don't need it.  We just needed it for that one time.  So the value that the customers were getting out of MySQL Enterprise was very transient.  So MySQL introduced the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and actually increased the renewal rate and  the stickiness, if you will, of their customer base.  Not necessarily a bad thing.  The thing with MySQL Enterprise Monitor was it wasn't something that you couldn't do  yourself.  You could totally monitor and manage everything in your MySQL space.  They just made it easier.  They made it so you didn't have to have that expertise if you didn't have it.  So they made something that was replaceable but it provided a really important value add  to the MySQL ecosystem.  And there were companies who bought MySQL Enterprise just so they could have the Enterprise Monitor  and that really improved the quote-unquote stickiness for them.  And as we talk about different open source models, realize where these type of things  fit in and a lot of these are driven by the stickiness factor.  So the most popular models, a lot of models and a lot of companies start with this pure  services model.  And when we talk about pure services, this is where you release open source, whether  it's GPL, whether it's MIT, whether it's BSG license, whatever license it is, and you're  not selling subscriptions to the software, you're selling services.  Whether that's support, consulting, managed service, whatever, this particular model is  really easy to start with.  It is 100% people powered.  But what people power means is it doesn't have a lot of profitability.  You have pay salaries and you can only sell what you have capacity to deliver.  There's all kinds of challenges with this model.  Retention and expansion can be harder because you have to continually prove the expertise  and have the expertise available.  So this is a challenging model.  And this is where you can be successful here, but you have to continually show that you're  the best.  And the best will always have a place.  But investors don't like this model that much because it doesn't have the stickiness of  other models.  And so the stickiness model that kind of became the prevalent model for quite some years has  been the open core.  And open core has evolved greatly over the time period of open source.  And if you're not familiar with open core, this is where you reserve features for paying  customers.  You have a community version and you have an enterprise version.  And in the enterprise version, you have many features that aren't available to the open  source space that aren't necessarily open source.  And if you want to take advantage of any of those features, or if they're required, you  have to pay.  This has some value to some customers if they're using those features.  It does have medium stickiness because what happens is people in the open source space  will develop open source alternatives.  So classically, companies start to move more and more features that are required for operations  to a closed source enterprise solution.  So you might have an open core version that, hey, if you want to back up your database,  or you want to back it up hot, you have to pay us.  Well, doesn't everybody have to back up their database?  That seems kind of bad.  That seems like something that the open source community would be like, well, I want to use  your product.  I just don't want to pay for just a backup tool.  So someone will develop a backup tool.  So this model is very susceptible to disruption.  And so you'll see companies be able to replace some of those enterprise features with open  source versions of them.  That happens all the time.  But more so than that, what you're seeing with this open core version is it's starting  to be replaced, right?  Because you've got this awesome enterprise version, and now people are starting to develop  alternatives to it.  They're starting to move them into what is kind of the new hotness for everybody, which  is the as a service model.  You can't move five feet without seeing something about infrastructure as a service, cloud providers,  databases as a service, platform as a service, software as a service.  If you're developing applications, it's probably being built as a service, and you're probably  building it off of open source.  And this is where it provides a really high level of stickiness, because it's about you  giving up control to a vendor.  You're outsourcing the entire functionality for that particular function, whether it's  software, it could be business software, it could be infrastructure, and you're giving  it to someone else to maintain own and control.  And that does lead to a lot of lock in in a lot of cases, because it's really, really  difficult to move from one provider to another in a lot of these cases, because you don't  have that open standard.  That's why things like Kubernetes have become very popular, because you can go multi-cloud  and you can more easily move things between infrastructures.  But when you talk about that as a service model, there's that tradeoff.  You give up control for ease of use.  And that is something that a lot of companies and a lot of individuals are willing to do.  And so that's something to be mindful of.  So this has a high level of stickiness.  This is where a lot of things are moving towards, but this also has a massive amount of lock  in.  So it's something to be mindful of.  Now the final model that I'll talk about is what I call the cyborg Robocop or hybrid  model, trying to merge all of those other models together.  Some people call this tech-enabled services.  Think of this where you give away your open source software for free.  You make sure that if it is required to run all the operations, it's out there in the  open space.  But you might have value added services.  You might have AI components.  You might have other things that are part of a subscription.  And so it's not that you don't necessarily need those things.  You can do them on your own.  But you're paying for the efficiency or the value that enables you to move faster.  And so we're starting to see that, and this is more of a DIY, if you will.  So you control your fate.  And so that's something that we're seeing out in the space now as well.  Now let's talk specifically on commercial open source, because this is where it gets  really interesting and this is where the risk factor comes in.  So I've kind of talked about the different models.  Now let's talk specifically about commercial open source.  So if you're going out there to build a company that is an open source company, who are you  building your company for?  Are you building it for the world?  Are you trying to make the world a better place?  Are you trying to enable people to do things that they could never do before and revolutionize  some part of the industry?  Could be.  It could also be that you're really focused on a specific community.  You might find that your niche is enabling a very specific community to do something  better.  Could be web developers.  Could be veterinarians.  It could be people who are developing Go or Python.  It doesn't matter.  Are you building this to enrich the community, to make more people more effective?  It's a good question.  Or maybe you're just trying to enhance the users of a particular software.  Maybe you are fans of MySQL and want to build a MySQL tool that is going to help all the  users of MySQL do something better, more efficient.  It's a good way to get in there.  Or are you really focused just on the shareholder value?  And this is the one that most companies that are in the open source space that are the  darlings of Silicon Valley are chasing.  It's shareholder value first, shareholder value second, shareholder value third.  And this started with the original OG.  I mentioned MySQL a few times.  When some bought MySQL for a billion dollars.  Everyone looked at that as a moment that open source as a business model had arrived.  Open source is a legitimate business model.  It's right there in the headline.  And what that did was it made investors go, whoa, I want a billion dollars too.  So they started looking at open source companies in a different light.  And the thing that they saw was, wow, look at some of these companies and the reach that  they get, the downloads, the users.  Oh my, look at how many people will use open source software.  Wow.  But it's not that they thought, wow, look at how great they're affecting the world,  changing the world, making it a better place.  Look how they're servicing the community.  No, no, no, no.  What they saw was, wow, I can monetize that.  I can make that worth more money.  And the owners or the people who have that open source project right now, you know what?  They don't understand business.  I do.  I'm going to take my business knowledge.  I'm going to apply it to your open source model and we're going to become filthy rich.  And if you look at open source now, and this is from a couple of years ago, open source  is the rule, right?  I have talked to investors before who have said they really only want to invest in open  source companies.  They've talked to people who were going to go proprietary and they're like, you need  to be either SaaS or open source, depends on what you're going to do.  And here you see that, you know, two years ago, two dozen venture firms that invest a  lot in open source.  That's even more now.  It's even higher.  And you know, it's interesting because even they recognize, you know what?  Open source really isn't a business model.  It's a development model.  And I think that the mindset of these investors, however, shows you how some of the open source  companies have evolved.  Look at this quote by Gary Little from Canva Ventures.  Open source works for adoption purposes, but is poor for monetization.  Of course, this is all about monetization.  That's your monetizing at different levels.  So how do we monetize outside of just open source?  And that's where you have to think about, oh, what do we bolt on top of the open source  project to make this better?  And then Jocelyn Goldfein actually says, the beauty of an open source from an investor's  perspective is disruption, not innovation.  Don't care about innovation.  Don't care about, you know, new contributions, but it's the contribution to marketing, not  research and development.  Don't care about new features.  They care about reach.  They care about how many people are using the software.  And this is a very proprietary way of thinking, right?  So if you think about like classic businesses, businesses want more market share.  They want to sell more and they want to continue to sell into that audience and get them to  be sticky and lock them in.  If you look at the commercial open source space, I went and took five commercial open  source database companies and looked at where their executives had previously worked.  Okay?  This is a list.  Now, take a look at the list.  You notice something missing.  There's not a lot of open source pedigree here.  You might argue that Sun or Google has some open source background, but they're not open  source companies.  They do some open source, yes, but they're not open source companies in the pure sense.  And those are only a total of four of these companies that are in here out of 40 to 50  executives.  You see Oracle, VMware, LinkedIn, BMC, Informatica, Symantec, New Relic, IBM, Cisco.  These are not companies and these are not people who have an experience in that open  source space.  So they're approaching this from a pure business model perspective and they're going to bring,  they're going to bring the 90s and 2000 Oracle to the open source space.  And that scares the hell out of me and it should scare the hell out of you.  And these are the people who the investors really want in these companies because these  are proven companies that have made money.  You don't take my word for it.  Let's talk to or listen to what the CEO of MongoDB said.  We didn't open source MongoDB to get help from the community or to make the product  better.  We open sourced it as a freemium model to drive adoption.  They don't care about contributions, they don't care about innovation, they want adoption  so they can try and monetize that.  And the analysts in the financial analysts, they love that.  In fact, here's a financial analyst, Billy Dubberstein.  He actually says that open source, especially this is database open source, this is MongoDB,  this is good where MongoDB is because if a company wants to switch vendors, it would  have to lift all that data from the old database inserted into a new one.  That's not only a huge pain, it's also terribly risky should any data get lost.  Therefore, most companies tend to stick to their database vendor over time, even if that  vendor raises prices.  That's how Oracle became a tech powerhouse through the 90s.  So analysts want MongoDB to become the next Oracle.  That's bad.  I don't know if you remember Oracle in the 90s, but they were not a fun company.  And it's that lock in, that's the goal.  And that's where we're starting to see the pressure for these commercial open source  companies.  How do we lock people in?  How do we move away from pure open?  And let's trick people into moving to this as a service and we'll start moving our features  to as a service only and they'll never be released to open source.  Woo-hoo!  That'll be awesome.  But the problem is, right now, open source companies are growing, but they're losing  hundreds of millions of dollars.  Take a look at the revenue numbers.  So MongoDB from 267 million to 422 million, Elastic 272 to 428 million.  Income for these.  So this is the profitability, if you will.  So Mongo, 422 million, but they lost 197 million.  So they spent 197 million more than they made.  And you look at this and you're not seeing the profitability with these companies.  So they are struggling and they're getting immense pressure to figure out how to protect  the revenue they have and grow it substantially because they're following a very classic NoSQL  model.  Just like NoSQL has eventual consistency, we have eventual profitability in the open  source space right now, which is a horrible model from a business perspective, but we  keep on trying it.  And this means that we have this rapid cycling of different ideas and different things that  erode what is classically open source.  And if you don't believe me, look at the licensing whack-a-mole that has been going on recently  in the open source space.  Right?  GPL forces you to contribute if you distribute the code.  Okay.  Well, do you distribute the code with the cloud?  No, not really.  Okay, let's do AGPL and let's do more open core because that way we can not have the  cloud disrupt us so much or we can control more.  Oh, databases in SAS is growing so SSPL because we want to go anti-cloud because we want  to control our own cloud and we should be the only ones who control what our software  does and who makes money off of our software.  And so this is about control and investors, not about the community and not about getting  better.  Now, there are examples in the OSS space, the open source space, on both sides, good  and bad.  Let's take one example because a stalwart between of open source and someone who has  repeatedly said they're committed to open source, Elastic is a great example of the  open source spirit nowadays.  They had to change to open core, okay, they went to AGPL, but look, they guaranteed a  couple of years ago that they're never going to change away from the licensing scheme that  they have.  They keep this open source.  What?  What?  Oh, oh, wait a minute.  What do you mean?  Oh, well, okay.  They promised for about a year and a half that they would do it and they stuck within  the year and a half to keeping it open, but evidently forever is a year and a half in  Elastic time because now, guess what?  They're restricted again.  Let's look at Elastic as an example.  I like this headline down here because I talked about monetizing the cloud, right?  If we look right there, Elastic changed open source license to monetize because that's  what this is all about.  Let's look at why they changed.  They came out with a blog and they were like, oh, AWS, not cool, not cool, but they changed  for a couple of reasons.  They said, number one, trademark violations.  Number two, very serious accusation that people copied their proprietary code, decompiled  binaries, and then copied the code and then contributed it back to open source projects.  So IP theft, intentionally misleading customers, and just not plain nice.  You're not plain nice.  Those are some fairly serious accusations.  If we look at the history of Elastic here, Elastic was fairly open pre-2008.  And then as the pressure mounted to continue their growth, they doubled down on open by  going open core and by using AGPL, which then made AWS respond by saying, hey, we have these  packages that we don't want in the proprietary versions, that we don't want to necessarily  follow the same restrictions that you have.  So we're going to do the open distro and get our stuff in, and we're going to release  that as open, which then Elastic responds, we're going to sue you.  And we're going to sue a company called Search Guard, who they claim stole their software.  And so then as that works its way through the court system, still under litigation,  now Elastic decides, well, we're going to go SSPL and we are no longer open source.  So thank you very much, 1600 contributors.  Thank you for all of your help, community.  We don't need your help anymore.  If you'd like to contribute to our proprietary code base, yeah, we might accept it.  That's not cool.  It really isn't.  And you look at these types of statements, right?  You look at the statement up here that they're willing, that they're never going to change,  and then they change.  Can you really trust vendors to not chase the dollars?  Can you really trust them to stay on their laurels?  To stay true to what they've promised us?  And the answer is no.  This is not about cloud disruption.  Companies are making money.  They're not profitable because they have bad business models.  Because open source isn't a business model.  You need to figure out how to monetize that.  You need to figure out how to make it work.  But they've decided to follow a path of we need massive growth year over year so we can  increase shareholder value and continue to do that.  They're burning community bridges as they do that.  And this is not about cloud.  This is about control money and exit plans.  And you look at some of these other things when you talk about infringing code, you can  look at the court case here.  There's examples.  These are very serious accusations because it's not okay to just copy commercial code  and release it as open source.  That's bad.  But I think there's a difference that we have to understand that there's a difference between  inspired by and infringed on.  I don't know what it is.  They're litigating.  I'm not a lawyer.  But when we talk about inspired by, I can as an open source user look at proprietary  code or a proprietary product and say, you know what, I think I can build a better backup  solution.  I can build a better monitoring solution.  I'm going to.  I'm going to build an open source version.  You can't copy code, but you can be inspired by the other systems.  And you know, there's a clear line when you talk about this.  For instance, Oracle, Oracle, we'll, you know, you can contribute code to a lot of open source  project at Oracle.  And in the past, and I think it changes a little bit, they would actually rewrite contributions  so they could establish clear ownership of IP because they wanted to de-risk themselves  from potentially, you know, getting that finger pointed back at them.  But you can still have inspired by code in the open source space and it's okay.  And that's part of the disruption.  And if that goes away, we've got a big problem.  Trademarks, you have to abide by trademarks.  Of course, all open source companies want you to follow the trademark rules.  Each one has their own, but there's special rules, right?  Some things you can do, some things you can't.  And so there's that fine line there as well.  Now, specifically when we talk about the SSPL, there's a few challenges that really worry  me and concern me.  First is SSPL is really designed to restrict your usage in a SAS database as a service  environment.  The language is written in a relatively vague way that you have to follow what they provide  in FAQs to really guide you on what's acceptable and isn't.  And it's very open to interpretation.  So right now it's no databases as a service, but maybe in the future they might say, well,  you're going to spin up 100 databases in your data center to support your one SAS application  because you're using maybe Kubernetes.  Now you're going to have to pay all 100 because you're violating the SSPL if you're not using  the quote unquote enterprise version because guess what?  That's a service.  It's a little bit of a gray area.  And that worries me because open source is special because of community collaboration,  freedom, innovation, and quality.  You can't innovate.  You can't innovate there.  And you're putting limits on the community by adopting some of these shareholder first  practices.  And people are going to start thinking that that's the normal.  And this is where the big danger comes in.  People are using open source, the name, and it's being hijacked to mean something completely  different.  Contributors are being treated poorly and they're being treated as second class citizens  because guess what?  We're not doing this because we want contributors.  We don't want community.  We want adoption.  We want money.  We want monetization.  And now the next generation of developers who are going to develop the next generation  of code for us are thinking this is the new normal.  And that's just wrong because that, again, is going to stifle the innovation that we  have.  And as long as there's money to be made or there's money left on the table, these companies  are going to continue to change and monkey and restrict things.  And that's going to hurt everyone.  And as soon as they stop making money, guess what?  They're going to ditch this and they're going to slander all of us because they're going  to say, oh my God, open source, you can't make money off that.  It's not a real thing anymore.  This new thing, it's only as a service, it's never going to be open source.  Whatever they're going to say, because if you can't make money off of it, they're going  to start giving it a bad name.  And so that's going to be something we need to overcome because that all hurts the ability  to innovate.  Because if you can only innovate if you own the code, that's a bad position to be in.  Think of it like this, Lucine.  If Lucine was SSPL, Elastic would not exist today.  Why can Elastic then take what they built off of Lucine and then make it SSPL and claim  that it's going to have the same level of innovation?  And I'll leave you with this thought.  There's a Cherokee proverb that talks about the battle of two wolves inside all of us.  One is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, and fury, or ego.  The other one is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.  Who wins?  Whichever one you feed.  Who are we going to feed here?  Shareholder value first or the betterment of the community?  Whichever one we spend more time in, whichever one we focus more on, that's the one that's  going to win.  And we need to make sure it's the right one.  Thank you.
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