There is no universal definition of success in open source projects.
Everyone participates open source these days. Microsoft just released 3D Movie Maker software under an open source license. Spotify has a bunch of projects it’s released and what funds it contributes to, and just announced a fund to support the people who maintain the projects. There’s even game engine code from the Middle Ages (1998) open source.
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With these and millions of other projects are available, that’s a reasonable question to ask… why? Or rather, why are most of these projects important, and for whom? Most projects, after all, will never Kubernetes.
However, after more than two decades of using open source, I’m starting to realize this is the wrong question.
Example of Firecracker
Join Firecracker, an open source micro virtualization project AWS released in 2018. Firecracker is almost universal acclamation as amazing technology… and then virtually disappeared from public view. I wrote about some of the early successes of the communitybut even that (Weaving Ignite to improve Firecracker’s ease of use, among other things) comes from a close AWS partner. To give Firecracker more community, I suggested that AWS Follows Google and Extends Governance Around Firecrackernot just its code.
AWS didn’t listen but, not for the first time, my opinion doesn’t seem to matter. (That’s a polite way of saying maybe I was wrong.)
Fast-forward to 2022 and Firecracker is slowly being used in many interesting places. I say “quietly” because, why are people shouting their infrastructure from rooftops? But when I requestsome interesting users have appeared, like Stripes, Fly.io, System Initiative and than. Of course, it is still true that most Contributors to Firecracker employed by AWS.
But even if Firecracker remains a community of one (AWS), it’s arguably worth it. In fact, that’s basically what I argued while working for AWS, showing that there are clear customer-oriented reasons to use open source Firecracker, regardless of community involvement. The open source code ensures that Firecracker will play well with the Linux community and allows customers to more closely “increase product mixes”.
Millions of cannons
Now let’s play this Firecracker example multiplied by hundreds of millions of GitHub (and other open source) repositories. It’s not about being the next Kubernetes. For every open source project, it’s about meeting the needs of an individual developer, a company, or a broader community.
Sometimes those needs can be great. In a conversation I had with Lyft engineering lead and Envoy founder Matt KleinHe emphasized that, “For most people who use open source, it is really a net negative” because “if they don’t invest in it, if they don’t do all these [like PR, marketing, and hiring], they will throw something over the wall. For Klein, having significant industry-wide involvement in Envoy helped make the project worth the investment he (and Lyft, in other words) made.
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But perhaps not everyone needs to receive such profits. In the case of Firecracker, it’s enough to open source the code and just have the client collaborate, as I’ve argued. In contrast, for Google, which is said to be trying to drive multi-cloud reality through Kubernetes, that must be a huge step forward. Each project will have different needs and different metrics of success.
So you’re not the next Kubernetes? It’s good now. Are you also not the next Cannon? Well okay. For open source developers, the key is figuring out what a healthy project makes sense for your specific needs, and not being distracted by other people’s definitions of success.
Disclosure: I work for MongoDB but the views expressed here are mine.
