Drawback of Open Source

I'm a huge fan of open source projects.  Most of the software that I install at home is open source, and I have thrown some money at a few projects that I like.  My own preference on the matter is that there should be contributions made by companies that use open source.  I've identified a few things that bother me about the current state of funding open source, some of which I will become very hyperbolic about.

RedHat.  The enterprise standard.  Please stop trying to charge for every single feature.  We used to make fun of Microsoft about their licensing.  How much is it going to cost for me to run a virtual container environment with software defined storage?  What if I want to have a local patch repository and centralized management? I suppose I will need to pay for RHEV, Ansible, Ceph, RHEL, Satellite, OpenShift, Docker EE, and whatever else you can find in there.  Or I can spend a few minutes looking up alternatives and use the cost savings as a selling point to the C level.  Convoluted licensing for products that were free up until they became RedHat products is a bad path to go down.

Also, notice that the Docker EE license comes from Docker?  That will not be the case soon.  Because RedHat couldn't figure out a decent strategy to make more money off of it, the are fleshing out Buildah as a replacement for Docker.  It also looks OpenShift is going to be a full step away from Kubernetes.  It's almost as if the community creates a standard, and RedHat makes enough minor changes that it no longer works with the community.  Don't believe me, take a look at what port they use for VXLAN compared to what is defined in the RFC. 

But, RedHat is the easiest way to pay for enterprise open source software.

Aggregate 1:
Ready to drop Docker in RHEL

Aggregate 2:
Standards being fleshed out in 2017

While I was scanning through the news one morning, I saw something relevant to my interests.  How to pay for open source projects.  This should be a no-brainer, just hit the donate tab on their website.  That's generally not how it works in corporate environments. The article sounded like a nightmare scenario for any admin.  Let another company scan your systems for open source software, and you pay the open source developers to keep your projects up to date.  Yeah, no thanks.  It is still a step in the right direction.  It does offer a method of payment from corporate customers, and it can make sure that critical software stays up to date.  But, if the dev team has heavily modified the software, then there is potential that it is not something that they want patched or changed at all.  It could be a part of a whole new application that the company does not want to rebuild every time some code change happens in the underlying technology. 

Aggregate 3:
A good start

So, the ideal solution in my mind is to find a way to pay for open source, reduce risk by holding the scanning tools, and being able to have a line item method of paying for mandatory components.  While I do not believe that Tidelift is 100% there, I think they are the closest to what is needed.  And, if enough customers agree on what is the correct approach, I'm sure Tidelift will create a policy based on that.  And no, I am not paid by them.  If you're looking to ditch some of the RedHat licensing and want to make sure that you can maintain support, I'd look into Tidelift.

Aggregate 4:
Pretty neat