Who eats who in open source
The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other operational costs even if it has a license overhead or creates vendor lock-in.<p>I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers <i>prefer</i> open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.