Ubuntu's next wave: Open server, closed cloud
I admit that I nearly got caught up in my former colleague James Urquhart's excellent analysis of Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 release, code-named Karmic Koala. I saw the word "open" laced heavily through the post, and given Canonical's commitment to fully open-source Ubuntu experience, I played along.
But something doesn't quite fit in Canonical's story.
It's called Amazon.com. Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 will give users an option to build its own Elastic Compute Cloud-style service, using open-source Eucalyptus (or another cloud provider), but the intent certainly seems to seamlessly plug users into Amazon's closed cloud:
Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the APIs of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to set up their own cloud using entirely open tools...During the Karmic cycle, we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image...Wouldn't it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?
Or is Ubuntu simply making it easier to navigate one's way into the Amazon jungle but not to get out of that jungle?
This isn't meant as a criticism. After all, I've increasingly seen that the best way to monetize open-source software is with the careful inclusion of proprietary software. I told The New York Times' Ashlee Vance that Mark Shuttleworth would eventually have to grapple with this same strategy, basing it on my own conversations with Shuttleworth about how to effectively monetize Ubuntu.
That strategy increasingly points to tethering an open server (and desktop) with closed cloud services. That's not a critique. It's a fact.
Unfortunately, it's also a fact that once Ubuntu hands off its customers to a closed cloud, it depends on that cloud vendor to offer open data policies. The delivery of such policies is out of its hands. It won't have much say in the matter.
It's ironic, in many ways, that the key to Canonical monetizing Ubuntu will be proprietary software. There's a very good reason that Canonical isn't leading with a link into open-source software like Eucalyptus: just as Red Hat depended on proprietary Oracle to drive its early business, Canonical's best chance of driving open-source revenue from Ubuntu is likely to be closed-source Amazon.
Amazon's service is popular. It's also proprietary. Depending on an open but weak cloud service would be futile; building bridges to proprietary Amazon will likely not.
Canonical, just as Google has done in search, is helping its users build habits. I am sure that there will be positive financial remuneration to Canonical, the more that Ubuntu users indulge their Amazon EC2 habit--a habit that Canonical therefore will have an interest in feeding.
Is this bad? No, it's business. Even Canonical needs to make money, and it's really, really hard to make a lot of money by giving everything away.
Some things need to be closed. In this case, it's the cloud that Ubuntu will feed.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I respectfully disagree with your premise that any successful open source strategy must be subordinated to a successful proprietary software strategy. As I have written on my <a href="http://opensource.org/blog/8">OSI Board Blog</a>, I believe that one of the largest opportunities for open source today is to remediate the $1 trillion dollars a year that proprietary software is costing us in flat-out dead-loss costs. I believe that the industry and the world have reached a point where we all agree that an investment loss rate of more than 30 cents of every dollar is simply unacceptable, and I believe that the company that best addresses /that/ problem is going to be the medium-term winner.
You can rationalize semi-proprietary strategies all you like, but those strategies are all too clever by half, because they all imagine winning the next battle in a war that's already been lost.
But there's a more telling argument to be made about Red Hat's business: it depends upon its success to date on selling proprietary software. Where would Red Hat be without Oracle? It wouldn't be doing nearly $600M, that's for sure. Had Red Hat decided to stick to a completely open source story, it would be...Mandriva, or something like that.
Trust me, Michael, I don't *want* open source/proprietary hybrid models. But I think that's what we're stuck with. I would be **ecstatic** to get away from them, and spent years talking myself into a 100% free model. But then I was given a quarterly number, and the higher it became, the harder it was to sustain it with giving software away. I suspect that if you talk with your salespeople internally, they'll have a very different perspective on open source than you do, and that I'd like to.
OSS is slowly becoming the same thing commercial kingpins like yourself help create, a hybrid bastardization of OSS software. OSS was never meant to be reigned in by your types, but you guys keep trying to exploit our software and force unwanted compromises on the table. This act of trawling OSS users for commercial exploitation, rather than mutual benefit for the sake of openness and sharing, has created a dangerous precedent. As all types like you, you all pretend to aid the community of people you try to exploit until the original image of the community is totally destroyed, and you have to find something else to exploit in what you excuse as being capitalist, but has more similarities with communist exploitation.
Secondly, this is not about communism! If you believe it to be communism, please tell me which communist state has control over Linux, I would very much like to know.
Linux is above your scope of comprehension, you cannot place it in your closed-box perceptions. It is owned by THE PEOPLE!! Weather those people are from china, from the USA, from Sweden, from Venezuela, or from Iran or any other country ruled by any ideology. This is beyond anything you have witnessed before.
People need to realize the FOSS movement for what it is and stop misleading the public by labeling it incorrectly.
But I do see form the current evolution that things will go like this : Fully proprietary -> Hybrid -> Fully GPLvX . We are heading to an hybrid era and I am not sure how long that will last.
@supernatendo, I think you did not really get that comment since you seem to agree with it.
Our compretitors are Microsoft, Intuit and SAGE. For them its also not about Open or Closed, they are very happy to give away free software to aquire users. So the whole industriy seems to be merging again. Cetainly open source comepanies should not fear about using closed companies like Oracle or Amazon, why tie one hand behind our backs we should use anyone that will help us.
Excellent analysis, as always. You raise a very important point, but I have to ask: does supporting Amazon APIs with a toolset necessarily reflect capitulation to Amazon as an exclusive monitary strategy? In other words, does Canonical have to rely on a single proprietary source of revenue, or can they use their openness to leverage dozens? If they do the latter, does that make them any less open?
I noted that I hoped they would do the same for support of the GoGrid API. That is one way to leverage about a half dozen more proprietary clouds, if Randy Bias's efforts are successful. They can also arrange to provide standard and customizable images on those services as well.
I think Ubuntu actually does better if they don't "lock" people into one cloud, but provide tools to allow people to choose from many, don't you?
James
As always you're spot on with your analysis. However you have an advantage. You already know that portability and freedom in the utility computing world (aka cloud) through open source standards (reference models) is what I've been arguing for over the last 3 years (as per my OSCON talk in 2007) and that I'm now working at Canonical in helping to define cloud computing.
It absolutely does not make sense for Ubuntu to lock people into a cloud. It does however make sense to drive towards the creation of marketplaces and ecosystems with freedom of choice and movement between providers and your own infrastructure.
For numerous reason (I've explained the basics on my blog : http://blog.gardeviance.org/2009/02/wide-of-mark.html), the formation of markets will require standards and hence open source reference models (i.e. open standards for data are necessary but not sufficient to create such portability).
However whilst the intention would always be to create an ecosystem, this should not exclude a provider who offers a proprietary implementation of any future standard. The key is to provide users with freedom and choice whilst allowing providers to compete on what they are good at i.e. volume operations. The two are not mutually exclusive.
This move by Canonical starts us on a journey to a world of competitive marketplaces, freedom and choice in service provision. There are many opportunities for revenue generation in such an ecosystem without needing to resort to an open / proprietary model.
Excellent post Matt, it certainly has raised some good discussion points. However the reasoning that this is some form of lock-in strategy into a single cloud provider is wide of the mark.
- by tvoneicken March 17, 2009 6:47 PM PDT
- This is a very weird analysis, I don't see where you get all that Ubuntu pushing users to the closed cloud stuff from, and I don't see either how they'd make money off the fact that it's closed. Isn't it much simpler? By and large Amazon dominates the public cloud market. Ubuntu wants to be a player in the public cloud. Therefore it better offer itself as the best OS choice in that market. Simple, no? Open/closed cloud is besides the point, the point is being the OS of choice for anyone who is going to operate in a cloud environment.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(18 Comments)Also, if you run Ubuntu on EC2 then that doesn't make revenue for Canonical, so I fail to see your point completely about monetizing anything here. Presumably Canonical will offer you support in the cloud environment, but that's no different than offering support in the datacenter environment, which they do today. Do you complain that Canonical offers you support on dell servers because you have to pay dell for the servers? What different here? You pay Amazon for the servers too and they operate them for you to boot!
Finally, you quoted: "Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the APIs of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to set up their own cloud using entirely open tools". Did you read that? It says that Ubuntu embraces Amazon's APIs in that it's gonna make it easy for anyone to set up their own cloud. I'm sure you've looked at Eucalyptus, so you know that Eucalyptus implements the Amazon APIs, right? So rather than sending users to Amazon, I read that they're gonna entice Amazon users to move *away* from EC2 to their own cloud set-up.
Thorsten - CTO RightScale