Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource seems to think Open Source is stuck in a time warp and won't continue to evolve, I say he is wrong
In an interview in Forbes last week OpSource CEO Treb Ryan says that open source has a fatal flaw. It was built primarily for single tenant architecture and won’t be converted to multi-tenant public cloud support without a lot of heavy lifting. Ryan seems to think that anyone who is going to do that much heavy lifting would never open source all of that hard work.
Hey that sounds like when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Maybe instead of a fatal flaw in open source, it is a peek inside the mind of what makes OpSource tick. If they do any real heavy lifting or coding they would never consider making it open source. But that doesn’t mean others won’t. In fact the open source movement is full of examples of people who did just that.
To be clear here is what Ryan says:
Open source by and large was created for the single-tenant architecture. There are companies like Acquia that have created multi-tenant versions of Drupal for their commercial hosting service, but that was done by the founders of the project. I don’t know if they have made the multi-tenant part of it open source. But it’s a lot of work, it wouldn’t surprise me if they kept it to themselves.
But the bulk of use of open source is not going to be easily converted to a multi-tenant form. So when you set out to create a Web app, which I argue is going to have to be multi-tenant to achieve scale, you are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting.
I just think this logic is as full of holes as swiss cheese. Here are my rebuttals to Mr. Ryan.
1. What makes open source any more susceptible to this than closed source software? Come on now, most all software more than a few years old was not architected for multi-tenant. Why is this any more of a problem for open source than for closed source. Is Ryan’s point that somehow proprietary software developers are more responsive and nimble. If so, I’ll take that bet any day of the week!
2. Does Ryan think all open source software is frozen in a time warp? If the open source project has a vibrant developer community and there is a need for multi-tenant functionality, why wouldn’t the same talent that originally developed the open source software do some of the “heavy lifting”, the same way they did the heavy lifting in originally developing the software. Open Source software evolves more quickly than other software, I don’t think that will stop at the multi-tenant cloud border.
3. The cloud and open source abhor a vacuum. If there is a need for some multi-tenant functionality that is not being addressed by existing programs there is just as good or even a better chance that a new open source project will pop up to address the need and fill the niche. This is just a fact of open source and nature. Unless Mr Ryan thinks the laws of nature don’t apply to the cloud. Sort of like the magic grits in My Cousin Vinny.
So is multi-tenant functionality a fatal flaw for open source? I think not. But if OpSource wants to keep their code private and save it for only their use could we call it “Saving Private Ryan”.
