author:Liu Song Vice President of PingCAP

02 Open Source 1.0 to 2.0: The Rise of the Internet and the Birth of Digital Platforms (1990s to 2000s)

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by ESR and inlast centuryLinux born in the 1990s is a representative work of the open source movement. I believe everyone is familiar with it, so I won’t repeat it here. It should be pointed out that the background of the birth of Linux is a countermeasure to the era of Microsoft licensing, but the real scale of the open source trend is due to the fact that the LAMP open source technology stack became the Internet technology stack after 2000. The paper lays the foundation for big data. The open source technology stack has become the technological foundation of digital platform companies, which is a sign that open source has entered the 2.0 era.

At this stage, the open source technology stack has become the main support for the digital platform, and the influence of open source has expanded from Linux in the 1.0 era to the entire Internet.Networking technology stack.In the 2010s, when the mobile Internet broke out, the digital platforms in the mobile Internet era were few and far between.It almost completely supported the digital economy of the entire 2010s with the open source technology stack, including the most important Internet application fields such as search, e-commerce, social networking, payment, video, and local life.

Throughout the Internet era, open source has advantages over commercial software in terms of development efficiency and collaborative innovation mode, and has formed a dominant position in the fields of mobile operating systems, distributed technology, big data, artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies.

More importantly, in the mobile Internet era, the open source domain has expanded from the Linux community to cover the entire Internet community of engineers. The number of software engineers who understand open source has increased dozens of times, and the number of open source engineers worldwide has reached tens of millions.As the largest carrier of open source projects, GitHub just happened to come out in the 2010s, and it is still growing. Open source has become a way for software engineers to flock to it because it is “cool”.,good technology,of social value”. (Interested readers can see the development of all projects since the creation of GitHub from OSSinsight.io.)

03 Digital Platforms: The Implicit Commercialization of Open Source Technology Stacks

The biggest difference between the 2.0 era of the Internet technology stack and the 1.0 era of open source technology stacks is that open source technology engineers have created huge commercial value in the field of digital economy.

Linux in the 1990s could only barely stand on its feet in the squeezed stage of fighting against commercial giants such as Microsoft, and its commercial value and public influence were also very limited. The commercial value of the Internet digital platform is largely achieved by “innovative business model + open source technology stack”. The open source technology stack is one of the two fulcrums for the development of the digital platform model, and completes business with the help of network effects and data intelligence. mode closed loop.

“Internet technology stack = open source technology stack”, the open source technology stack completes the self-closing loop with the help of the Internet digital platform, which is the main feature of open source entering 2.0.

As a result, the open source technology stack has become the technical base for the digital platform to advance. In this era,No digital platform is underpinned by business infrastructure software.Because the commercial basic software cannot cope with a large number of users, the iteration speed is slow, and the unit cost is high. In the 2000s, both Amazon and Alibaba used Oracle’s commercial software for a long time at the initial stage, but the explosion of data caused by the mobile Internet caused both Amazon and Alibaba to abandon the Oracle database and use open source technology stacks to build technology systems, and Later, they all built their own cloud computing systems.

In the era of digital economy dominated by the mobile Internet, the open source technology stack is the invisible champion supporting the digital economy. The commercial value of the open source technology stack and the value of Internet engineers are realized in the value creation of the digital economy serving billions of people. In the digital platform era of the mobile Internet, open source technology has accumulated enough business influence and talent base, and has surpassed commercial software in terms of comprehensive influence, but it is not counted as income from software authorization.

The most important asset left by the mobile Internet is the group of software engineers familiar with open source technology in the global digital platform. These people themselves are the initiators and contributors of many open source projects. The initiators of distributed databases, big data, cloud native, artificial intelligence and other fields are these Internet engineers, and Internet engineers have always been active members of the open source community. They are also known as the main support in the new generation of open source startups. For example, the three founders of Confluent are from Linkedin, and the three founders of PingCAP are from Wandoujia. They all open source the projects of the basic software department of Internet companies independently. , and gradually become the promoter of a new generation of open source commercialization.

04 Open Source 3.0 from Cloud Computing: Overflow of the Internet Technology Stack and Cloud Computing as Digital Infrastructure (2010s)

The most important precipitation left by the mobile Internet is cloud computing. Cloud computing is a service form for Internet companies to externalize distributed resources and serve enterprise IT. It is a leap from the distributed open source technology stack that has been verified on the C-side to the B-side market. Whether it is AWS or Google proposed Cloud The concept is a conception of the distributed service form. The essence of this concept is to turn the Internet-proven distributed architecture into a computing model and service model for B-type enterprises.

In the competition and cooperation relationship between open source software and commercial software, there is a silent group of medium and large enterprise users. In the past 40 years, the enterprise applications used by these medium and large enterprise IT users mainly rely on business software, such as ERP, supply chain, CRM, HRM, etc. The basic software is also IBM,Oracle,,provided by companies such as Microsoft. They basically watched the mobile internet era and insulated themselves from the open source technology stack.

It was not until the late stage of the mobile Internet that these companies began to contact the Internet technology stack because they wanted to make various consumer-oriented mobile apps. At this time, cloud computing emerged as the times require, becoming a “ferryer” that transforms the Internet technology stack to serve enterprises. The emergence of cloud computing can also just fill the gap of large and medium-sized enterprises that are not familiar with the Internet technology stack. Large and medium-sized enterprises as users do not need a large team of engineers similar to Internet companies. The cloud service model represented by public cloud can encapsulate complex technology stacks into services, so that enterprise users can use these technologies only as resource users to serve their digital and user-centric business strategies.

The birth of cloud computing also gave birth to a very interesting thing, that is, public cloud services make the difference between open source software and commercial software irrelevant. As far as a specific capability of cloud services is concerned, what customers care about is the use value that can be cashed at any time – this use value is a service fee that can be paid in minutes and seconds, open source software can be divided with cloud service providers, and commercial software is also available. Can be split with cloud services.

In the era of cloud services, software licensing has been transformed into legal and commercial agreements between open source technology companies and cloud service providers, irrespective of end enterprise users. Surviving in the world of cloud services, there is only one problem left,Which software is more efficient in solving users’ problems? As a user, we only pay attention to who is easy to use and who can create value.Open source software has thus found a business model of “symbiosis” with cloud services. Whether it is open source or closed source, it is equal in the big stage of public cloud, because cloud service itself has become a larger service market. All large public cloud vendors will have a Cloud Marketplace, and various software, whether open source or not, can be put on the shelves and purchased by users at any time.

05 Business software giant turns to cloud and open source

Now, we turn our attention to commercial software vendors to see why they should also care about cloud computing and open source

After Microsoft CEO Satya took charge of Microsoft, the cloud-first strategy was implemented, and Microsoft’s market value grew fivefold in seven years. So, from Microsoft’s previous generation CEO Ballmer’s sentence “Open source is the cancer of the software industry”, to Satya’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Github after putting cloud first, what happened behind it? After missing out on the mobile Internet, how do commercial software companies think about the rise of cloud computing and open source?

Like their large and medium-sized enterprise users, business software companies are generally bystanders in the transformation of the mobile Internet and digital platforms.When the mobile Internet extends to cloud computing, AmazonandDigital platforms such as Google began to serve B-end users with the help of the cloud service model, and began to directly compete with the IT services of commercial software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM.So a competition between old and new forces began. Both IBM and Oracle have made slow progress in the cloud computing field due to the burden of the commercial software stock market. Only Microsoft’s Satya has made the switch relatively decisively and has become one of the three giants in the cloud computing era.

In recent years, Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub and IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat have also proved that you must embrace open source if you want to gain software leadership in the cloud era. This comes from the constant pain of commercial software – commercial software has always maintained a very low use value and a very slow iteration speed.

Taking basic software as an example, after satisfying the basic needs of users in operating systems, databases, middleware, development tools, etc., the commercial software R&D model often leads to extremely low innovation efficiency. Especially in the areas of cloud computing, distributed databases, big data, cloud native and other technologies after the outbreak of the mobile Internet, the innovation of commercial software companies has basically stagnated. % of new features fail to attract users’ attention. Because it is not open source, the connection between the R&D part of commercial software and user needs is completely broken, and the product manager cannot hear the user’s voice. Take the database as an example, the functions used by most users of traditional databases are still in the version more than ten years ago. Under this model, the cloud services transformed by some commercial software companies have the phenomenon of “ShelfWare” (shelfware), that is, a large number of new features are never activated even if the user purchases them. In the era of cloud services, commercial software companies must rethink the innovative model of embracing open source, and only by embracing the open source model can it be possible to find a path to the future.

06 Diversified Cloud 2.0 Era: The competitive and cooperative relationship between open source and cloud has become a normalized game, and unevenness and polymorphism have become the norm

After 2018, the cloud computing 1.0 era dominated by the IaaS layer came to an end. As a Walmart of computing power, cloud computing has provided enough convenient resources for thousands of users. At the same time, cloud computing manufacturers are gradually entering the 2.0 era in the competition.

The typical sign of entering the 2.0 era is the rise of multi-cloud and cloud-native, which in turn makesPaaS/SaaS of cloud-neutral vendors and cloud vendors’ own PaaS/SaaS can compete in the same field. If the cloud computing Marketplace is compared to an e-commerce store, the cloud-neutral products of independent vendors and the cloud products produced by cloud computing vendors constitute the main part of the ecosystem. Open source software is more powerful due to its rich functionality and iteration speed. The vitality of cloud vendors has become an important provider on the cloud vendor Marketplace.

With the help of cloud native, open source software generally has greater openness in terms of cross-cloud and integration, which gives open source software an advantage in the competition with the independent products of cloud manufacturers, which also makes the competition between cloud manufacturers and open source software companies. normalize. This may be a game with no end in the short term.

There are no eternal enemies, only eternal interests. The competition and cooperation relationship between open source and cloud is very dynamic, and it is a continuous game and evolution. It is based on this kind of competition that the cloud ecosystem can maintain its continuous vitality, which is far better than the previous pure commercial software competition and pure open source ecosystem.

Back to the beginning of the article, the release of Google AlloyDB, the main market for the open source PostgreSQL user, PingCAP company where the author works, the open source database product TiDB has been recognized by a large number of MySQL users in the past 7 years for being compatible with MySQL and providing high scalability and HTAP capabilities. TiDB Cloud, its DBaaS product, provides MySQL users in a multi-cloud environment. Offers a cloud-enhanced option. So far, as far as the database track is concerned, the two major camps of open source stand-alone databases before, PostgreSQL and MySQL, experienced in cloud computing 1.0After the RDS model of the cloud, now there is a new enhanced version option in the cloud, which is the latest form of embracing open source in the cloud service model. These two are examples of the future evolution of the combination of open source and cloud. On a larger scale, a broad convergence of open source software and cloud services is just beginning. We have reason to believe that the competitive and cooperative relationship between open source and cloud will bring about a richer software industry ecology and provide an open and diverse ecological choice for digital users from all walks of life.

About the Author

Mr. Liu Song has more than 20 years of experience in the IT field. He has served as general manager of Oracle Greater China Technology Strategy Department and vice president of Alibaba Cloud. He has long served enterprise software solutions in China’s IT industry.databaseproduct market, cloud computing ecological development,Open source ecology,Industry-university-research think tanks, digital transformation research and other fields have long-term and in-depth experience in the combination of cutting-edge technology and industry transformation.consultWith experience in think tanks, he has led a number of books and research reports in the field of digital transformation and industrial Internet.