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Comment by Conan_Kudo

7 years ago

I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.

Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.

18 comments

Conan_Kudo

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TylerJewell  7 years ago

WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

indigochill  7 years ago

SUSE? They make a big song and dance (literally) of being open source, but I don't know if they're exclusively OSS.

  • cyphar  7 years ago

    [I work for SUSE.]

    Nowadays, yes. SUSE Studio was the main proprietary thing we had in recent memory, and it was sunlit a few years ago with KIWI being its successor.

    As far as I know, everything we develop is free software. You can get the full sources for any package in SLES or openSUSE (which isn't really SUSE but SUSE engineers work a lot on openSUSE) using zypper.

    Personally, not only is everything I work on free software, I also exclusively work upstream-first (and I maintain several upstream projects like runc and some OCI projects). To be clear, this is not a company-wide thing -- many of my colleagues do not consistently contribute upstream -- but regardless all of our products' sources can be downloaded under free licenses. In fact you can get the sources from OBS (it's what openSUSE Leap is directly based on).

    Now, there are some things that we distribute which are proprietary to certain customers (think flash or the NVIDIA drivers), but these are mostly because customers pay us to repackage other peoples proprietary code. We don't develop them. Personally I'd prefer if we didn't do this, but it is a very small part of our business.

    • TylerJewell  7 years ago

      @cyphar - I would love to chat with you about SUSE's policies and encouragement to enable working exclusively on upstream-first. We are working to bake that concept into our policies at WSO2 (I'm its CEO). While we practice that in motion, we are codifying it within policies. If you could email me tyler@wso2.com, would appreciate a chat about it with your or management there.

shaklee3  7 years ago

Is openshift really open source? I was under the impression that nobody really runs origin on its own since it's far too hard. It seemed more like they just wanted to point out but it's open source, but you need support and a lot of know-how to actually use it.

  • nunez  7 years ago

    OpenShift comes in two variants: Enterprise and Origin. Everything you can do in Enterprise can be done in Origin (Origin is ahead of Enterprise), but Enterprise comes with support.

  • Conan_Kudo  7 years ago

    I run Origin for my employer. It's pretty easy these days since you can do all of it with openshift-ansible and other related tools.

    I know there are plenty of others like that, as well.

    • snuxoll  7 years ago

      We run OKD (formerly Origin, the project was rebranded) as well and have for two years in just a couple weeks. It's been a pivotal part of our application stack since we adopted it, the developers on my team love being able to paste in a git URL and have an application live in a few minutes.