Open RAN and HashiCorp are making us rethink openness

Some open-source supporters have been upset about license changes and other shifts that contaminate the original value proposition, but the biggest contributor to that pollution may be buyer/user behavior. Among large enterprises, in-house open-source expertise used to be subjectively rated as “high” by every player just a couple decades ago, but today less than one-third offer that kind of optimism. And among SMBs, the number who think they have and can retain the skilled people to manage their own open-source tools is in the statistical noise level.

To use open source, more and more enterprises rely on some large organization to back their bid, and that puts pressure on the open-source initiatives to adopt things like dual licensing to permit charging for some version of the tools. Enterprises cite the problems with openness as a reason why white-box network devices haven’t swept the market. Who backs a mixture of chips, generic hardware, and a couple layers of open-source software?

And how do you innovate in a complex ecosystem? Could a team have painted the Mona Lisa? I asked an enterprise CIO that question, and got a question in return, a better one. “Who would go to see it?” Putting that point another way, not only does the open-model innovation theory have to ask how a vision of a system can emerge from a series of parts suppliers, it also has to ask who has the incentive to promote it, and whose name can give it credibility.

That metaphor suggests another question, though: “How would the team know what they were painting?”

I’ve seen a lot of open-technology projects that were founded to do something useless, impossible, or both. Even more that had a potentially worthy notion that demanded organized initiatives to validate and promote it, which never came to be. Open RAN may well be a glaring example. OK, so we open up parts of the RAN model that the 3GPP work kept closed. What actual benefit, if we define “benefit” as something that can make a business case, does that create? Most suggestions fall into the “glittering generality” category, and the few more concrete ones have failed to pan out, so you have to question them all. Yes, it created a play for smaller vendors, but what kind of vendor is winning the 5G deals? Ones whose headcounts could fill a small city.

We have to go back to the opening point, which is that buyers see open-model technology as the final defense against vendor misbehavior. It’s a great theory, but what good is a defense alliance with a player who you allow to starve to death while you’re waiting for an attack? And how many guarantors of your defense will emerge if that’s the fate that awaits them all?