Open source software has come of its age. Today it’s impossible to think of a platform company that doesn’t have an open source strategy. Even Microsoft – a company that once compared open source to cancer – has embraced it fully. Of course, we have companies like CloudBees, Red Hat and Docker that built highly successful business models with OSS. But when it comes to cloud platform vendors, the story is slightly different.
Though cloud is built on the foundation of OSS, the top 3 vendors – AWS, Microsoft and Google – have a very different approach to it. AWS and Azure are the largest consumers of OSS. Amazon EC2, one of the most successful IaaS platforms, is built on top of Xen, the popular open source hypervisor. Amazon has turned almost every successful open source project into a commercially available managed service.
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