Trust And Community Collaboration Drive Open Source Adoption In The Cloud

What factors are driving the adoption of open source?

• Trust is playing an important role because the source code is visible for everyone to use and it is transparent. 
• Since an increasing number of people are using open source and the community is growing, more people are trusting it and are adopting it. 

What should enterprises consider before switching to open-source solutions?

• A recent poll by CloudCasa by Catalogic found that the majority of respondents preferred open-source solutions with paid support as the preferred model. 
• Enterprises need experts to configure the solution to their own unique environment and you may not have users who are experts in hundreds of open source technologies. 

Things to consider when assessing involvement in open-source projects:

It is important to consider the topology of the project. Nadia Eghbal’s book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, identifies four types of open source projects, those with low contributor growth and low user growth – pet projects; those with low user growth but high contributor growth – clubs; ones with high user growth and low contributor growth – stadium projects; and high user growth and high contributor growth ones like Kubernetes. The latter two have potential commercial opportunities such as offering support for users or offering it as a managed service. 

The role of foundations in making open source more popular:

• When code is owned by an open source foundation, it offers a guarantee that it is going to remain open source and that it will be committed to community use of that project. 
• The next best model is shared development, which can help future-proof how open source gets used, such as in the case of Velero.

How does CloudCasa by Catalogic fit into the larger open-source ecosystem?

• By contributing with coding and bug fixes or writing code to support the open source community. 
• Maintaining a forum like a Slack channel by answering questions to help people successfully adopt the open source technology. 
• They have built a service that allows people to manage Velero across multiple clusters from a centralized UI to make it more accessible to users. They also provide a guided recovery path. 
• With commercial support so that companies can pick up the phone and speak to experts to troubleshoot.