According to the CEO of Percona, open-source developers are being pressured by their employers to use less permissive licenses.
Percona’s CEO had taken a swipe at open-source software vendors switching to proprietary or less-permissive open-source licences in an attempt to avoid being run over by cloud giants.
Peter Zaitsev said open-source companies are coming under increasing pressure from their boards to bring more software under a closed-source license, or something close to it, as they seek to compete with cloud vendors who take freely available open-source software and redistribute it as paid-for managed services.
Speaking at Percona Live this week, Zaitsev – who also co-founded the software and consultancy biz he heads up – said the promise of cloud computing had under-delivered for open-source database developers, forcing them to reexamine their business models.
“Many of the open-source software products were taken by cloud vendors, integrated in their cloud platform, extended, and offered in their proprietary fully managed service," he said. "That redirects a lot of the revenue stream from open source developers to the cloud vendor."
