Four Ways Open Source Can Help You Through a Recession
Whether you’re a business or an individual the open source community presents great opportunities during recessions like this. This post digs into the business of it all, including the ugly balance of CAPEX vs OPEX and budget squeezing. A lot of open source projects thrive and are even boosted by recessions. I am no Economist but you don’t have to take my word for this. A bit of digging finds plenty of great information:
- BusinessInsider
- CNET [2008]
- DotEDUGuru
- Drupal founder Dries Buytaert
- Forbes [2009]
- LinuxInsider [2009]
- OpenSource.com
- TechCrunch
- TechRepublic
To start out it’s important to lay out the business of open source companies and the software stream. In a nutshell open source software life cycles are represented by a stream. Community contributions, feature requests, bug reports, and documentation tends to be built upstream and filter downstream as it matures. Most open source projects are happy to have you join and contribute providing you accept their coding style and license or community contributor agreement. It’s a great way to help projects grow and make great connections. The Linux Foundation lays it out simply:
At HashiCorp we keep a very short and simple stream. If a feature is requested enough to make the roadmap it will be developed or reviewed on a tight schedule and packaged into both our open source and our Enterprise releases. Longer streams are often required when there are more parties or foundations involved that need thorough reviews and processes. The exception for this is our Terraform product. The migration to HCL2 required a rewrite of much of our community provider and module code, and meant that Terraform 0.12 took a bit longer than our previous releases. HashiCorp has joined the CNCF or Cloud Native Computing Foundation to help the Terraform community grow and support industry standards. Still we lead the upstream.
Red Hat packages downstream and on average has a pretty long process as they often have many platforms and independent projects to integrate along with multiple foundations that influence product direction. In the end you have a very robust solution with plenty of integrations but on the other hand getting a fix for your supported software can take a while or sometimes not be an option at all if the supported release is too new for a critical integration. Most changes must be made upstream. Unfortunately even some of my favourite Red Hat projects have plenty of Bugzilla issues flagged CLOSED_UPSTREAM or CLOSED_WONTFIX because you either need to wait for the next downstream release or upstream has eliminated the feature altogether. Don’t get me wrong I love Red Hat and they’ve been great for the community, but when the stack includes everything from diverse hardware support to application runtimes all while tying together multiple foundations, the development pipeline inevitably gets complex. Someone once told me Red Hat is not a software company, Red Hat is a sales company which packages up open source and sells support. Later someone else told me that Red Hat is an insurance company, selling you protection from faults in open source. Either way it’s a very clever business model but HashiCorp by comparison is still very much a software company first.
You’ll find downstream does not guarantee safety when it contains publicly documented 2 year old bugs that have been fixed upstream which are deemed not backwards portable.
Whether you’re a business, a senior professional, or a budding academic, where can open source as a community help you through a rough patch and set you up for a solid landing when the recovery takes hold? I’ll break it down into 4 main points.
Cost Savings
First and foremost, recession no longer inhibits innovation on a cost basis. In the dot com bubble of 1995–2001 a lot of tech companies struggled to justify expensive capital investments in software. In the worst case scenario liquidations counted hardware and software licenses as collateral against the debt used to purchase them. Can you imagine a repoman knocking to take your software back today? In a cloud world such capital expenses never needed to happen in the first place. An organization properly using infrastructure as code for their existence is well capable of scaling down their operating expenses during a dry spell. The best prepared have well established auto-scale groups that directly relate to revenue. Previous recessions have finished with great opportunities to pick up cheap pre-owned or repossessed hardware, whereas this is already the case going into the recession as cloud migrations have created great buying opportunities for people who still need their own tin.
Recessions are a great opportunity for open source to gain market share and save you money.
At HashiCorp we have been taking the right track with cloud-native offerings like our HashiCorp Consul as a Service (HCS) and Terraform Cloud SaaS which give users instant Enterprise support and also give you the chance to pay as you use. Also you can still use HashiCorp’s free open source releases locally to evaluate features and develop your idea. Quite a few of our Terraform, Consul, and Nomad users run binaries locally on their own MacBook, Windows, or Linux laptop. They can develop a local deployment while disconnected on the train or at the beach (or COVID isolation) and then apply that same code directly into a production Enterprise cluster or cloud. It’s a great way to bootstrap a startup before your funding option. Previous recessions choked innovation with software license costing issues. Just look at the commercial vs open source database trends presented by our friends at Percona:
It makes sense that open source projects see a spike of interest during weak markets and then a significant revenue bounce during recovery as users have had time on community releases and realize the benefits of Enterprise features as budgets return. In fact open source projects can be accelerated during times like COVID-19. More users usually means more development and community contributions.
Just look at Oracle’s revenue at the end of the dot com bubble 2001 and 2008–2009 recession. This data is only a part of the picture obviously — it would be helpful to compare this to the greater market. Still if a CIO asks to make some budget cuts, a large Oracle Database support contract might be a pretty big target. Even Oracle is much better prepared this time around with Oracle Cloud and database products consumable as managed service. Still Oracle is competing with a wide ecosystem of open source database projects that would love to break into that market share. I would even venture to say that open source software helps to keep prices in check when it comes to proprietary solutions. It’s a great form of healthy competition.
To search for an open source alternative to any pricey commercial software you use, have a look at resources like https://www.osalt.com/ which keep databases of community recommendations.
Career Building and Future Proofing
I may be dating myself (my Twitter handle is Old Man Yells at Cloud) but if I look back to 1998 in the dot com bubble, I spent my summer learning C++ and had to scrounge something like $400 on a copy of Metrowerks Codewarrior IDE for my PowerBook 1400c (back when “c” meant color monitor) which also cost something like $2000. As a teenager at the time I had to work like crazy for both of those but the world was my oyster. Today any teenager with $100 looking to get into coding can snag about 20x the power I had in a Raspberry Pi or a Pinebook running Linux and ubiquitous affordable wifi. They can even get a great free IDE called Visual Studio Code from a great up and comer to open source called Microsoft. The times couldn’t be more different today or more conducive to young people looking to start a career. Kudos to Microsoft for undertaking a major shift. I would place a minor long shot bet that if Windows market share is threatened by the recession they will decide to open source some version of Windows Core.
In the meantime there are plenty of people contributing great plugins and features to projects like VS Code and more. If you find yourself unemployed or just stuck in isolation in a tricky situation, contributing to open source projects is a great way to network and find your next opportunity while setting up for a strong recovery.
As a business it also helps to shift away from proprietary solutions that you maintain in-house when perfectly good open source solutions already exist. I’ve worked around Canary Wharf where entire teams are dedicated to proprietary apps for small groups of users. This results in slow onboarding for new recruits and large technical debt when someone at the team’s core decides to leave. Admittedly employee churn is more common with open source solutions but this also keeps fresh perspectives and increases the exchange of ideas. Businesses have a great opportunity to bring in consultants or contractors to take a fresh look at how they can improve or even convert large projects with open source alternatives.
Make sure any such consultant you bring in can explain the different open source licenses and what that implies for you trying to keep trade secrets from being released by force. At HashiCorp our projects are based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Part of the MPL guarantees you the ability to add on your own code without forcing it to be released back to the upstream project. Modifications to existing MPL code must be MPL whereas additions can be other licenses. This is how we build Enterprise binaries with our HashiCorp license on top of our own MPL open source offerings. We support great SDKs and standardized plugin frameworks such that you can write proprietary extensions or plugins for your own use and keep them private. Some of our best customers both pay for Enterprise and also distribute some or all of their customizations on GitHub which really helps our ecosystem and gives back to the community.
Hardware Trends
What about hardware architectures? Apple made the sudden announcement that they’re changing their preferred arch again from x86 to ARM. The ramifications for this are significant. The latest ARM chips are made with a smaller process and cost much less but also require rewrites of quite a bit of software. Luckily our open source builds are already available on ARM! Soon we will have Darwin ARM releases available for testing. Meanwhile politics are getting super interesting over at NVidia who is posed to buy ARM. It’s not official yet but my bet is that NVidia needs ARM more than anybody. As Intel has been planning a re-entry into the discrete GPU market, they are posing a dangerous threat to NVidia even as Intel’s current situation is extremely vulnerable. Now you have AMD who is self sufficient with CPU and GPU product lines, Intel with CPU and GPU product lines, and NVidia developing only GPUs. What better investment than buying ARM, which is imminently poised to overtake Intel as it struggles with multiple vulnerabilities and 7nm fab processes. Concerns have been made public about ARM needing to relocate from Cambridge UK to Silicon Valley but these concerns weren’t made when ARM was bought by Softbank Japan. I think ARM and NVidia + Mellanox will make a great combination and I look forward to seeing how open they intend to be. One thing I expect to see gain momentum during a recession is open architectures. OpenPower and RISC-V have been pushing to enter the markets along with OpenSPARC and OpenRISC, but they haven’t been able to gain much ground in the past. I think this was largely due to Intel’s dominance and reputation, which is in a much worse state this year. I would expect to see a lot of open source architectures make good gains into 2021 but ARM is going to steal the show this time.
Intel held the CPU trophy for a very long time, showing top performance and efficiency in a lot of categories. It turns out a lot of those performance gains involved cutting corners in the execution pipeline and now have presented themselves as security vulnerabilities. Some of these can’t be remediated in older systems. Still Intel has a very diverse portfolio and I expect they will bounce back nicely in the future. This time around they’ll have to stay competitive on price while winning back trust from the market.
Whatever arch you look towards for cutting costs and increase energy efficiency I’m sure our own HashiCorp products will be ready for all of it. Even some of the cloud providers have started building their own chips[₁,₂,₃] which in the long run will save you money if you can adapt to new architectures.
Work Environment
Lots of people have been sharing their COVID home office workspace tips in a sort of “home office challenge” which has actually inspired and given me a few ideas. More than just open source software running on a machine it’s nice to open source ideas for life. In essence this section is a bit of a water cooler ramble for people who may never find themselves back in an office after COVID-19.
The most extreme form of open source user is the purist. They won’t use anything that’s closed source including operating systems, IoT, wearables, and even monitor or TV firmware and hardware. I’m not quite that pure myself, but I love how my workspace is set up. Since a lot of folks have been posting their home office setup, I’m happy to throw in my recommendations based on my own budget home office using open source where I can.
Aside from the tech, there are plenty of important basics to have in your workspace. I remember one posting talked about always having water nearby to remember to stay hydrated. Good idea — I always keep an insulated press full of Turkish tea. Others have standing, walking, cycling, or juggling desks which are probably a good idea if work from home continues. I like to keep my desk uncluttered and free of cables but I rely on a few nontechnical features to keep me going.
- Whiteboard hidden behind door. Don’t get the cheap rolly sticky kind like I did — get a solid one. A marker is often faster than any app.
- Motivational wall art. Nautical map of the Caribbean with a handwritten letter from one of my heroes, Bill Marriott. Bill Marriott learned to quit overworking himself when he almost died from a heart attack and warns everyone not to forget about R&R and exercise before it’s too late.
- Plenty of natural light. I’m not sure how I’ll fare with short days and winter working from home. Be sure to have natural light when you can. Fluorescent light is definitely the surest way to crush my spirits in an office — I don’t know about you.
- Decent sound system. I have a basic Logitech 2.1 analog speaker set that is a major benefit of home offices. It’s great for calls and always has music playing between them. You’ll start a music war in the office but at home you can listen to whatever mood you need to focus.
- Energy monitor. I’m not one for voice assistants or smart home but I do like to track my energy usage. There are great open source systems for this. I actively tune every electric device to be as efficient as it can and always keep an eye out for wasted energy. As an American I was surprised to find UK electricity prices are almost DOUBLE what they are in the USA and for good reason. It keeps people from being wasteful. Germany is even triple.
But enough feng shui. What about the stack used? Personally I always like to stay a generation behind because new hardware is usually overpriced and yesterday’s hardware is still perfectly good. I also like simplicity with a large single screen. Multiple screens get to be complicated and too much to track. My desktop is an HP Z640 with 2x10 Xeons and 128GB RAM with room for 512GB. It handles anything I can throw at it and sips energy when idle — though admittedly still more energy than an efficient laptop. I’ve upgraded the CPUs and have option of up to 2x14. All of this in a pre-owned market cost about the same as today’s new MacBooks. One annoyance I have is that I cheaped out on the monitor. I snagged a 43" 4k TCL TV on sale once (£300) and it looks great but it isn’t really meant for being a computer monitor which reflects when auto-darkening turns off the screen if you leave a dark terminal up for a few seconds. Don’t cheap out on your screen. I definitely prefer a single screen these days though as multiple screens are too much to keep track of.
I was lucky enough to join HashiCorp early enough to pick out my own laptop. I did some work with Dell while I was at Red Hat and developed a real appreciation enough to try the XPS 13 with Fedora KDE spin, which has been pretty solid right out of the box ever since — even with the touch screen. Admittedly I’ve had a fair amount of AV issues with plugin or bluetooth headsets and USB-3 dongles but I think that is more due to me always running the latest Fedora release. For me the benefits outweigh the issues:
- Natively run any of our stack. No VMs are required for Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc. A single laptop can act as both server, client, and cluster using minimal resources.
- Fully customizable UI. I use KDE based on QT which takes the best parts of Windows UX while avoiding the worst parts of Mac OS X. I grew up on those old Macs but to this day I can’t stand a top menu bar that can’t be moved. KDE lets you customize all themes, menus, widgets, monitors, and even lets you create your own easily. I also pair it with Compiz which has been providing customizable desktop composition effects for years. I remember in 2006 people being impressed and asking me how I got an advanced copy of Windows Vista. Not Windows at all.
- Latest kernel features. In an earlier post I did cross compilation of our stack on IBM Power 9 and S390x platforms. KVM enabled me to do that. I’ve also been participating in Fedora’s kernel test program to validate the newest kernels as they launch. It’s a great group to be involved with and I’m looking forward to the impressive new IBM Power 10 support hitting KVM in Linux 5.9. I’ll also know ahead of time if there are any regressions with our HashiCorp products on a future release of RHEL or EL derivatives.
- Dog fooding! Dog fooding is the act of using your own products as part of your daily lives. Now that we have Linux packaging, I automatically get our own updates the minute they’re released and I’ll be the first one to flag any issues before they hit our production Linux users.
- Free! There are technical issues in proprietary software and there are technical issues in open source software. The good news is that currently the qualify of most free software in my mind is well on-par with proprietary software. Where open source lacks, Enterprise support generally fills in the rest, such as our Enterprise DR and critical systems support.
- Security. To the right of my keyboard is a USB extension where I keep my handy Yubikey for sudo. Unless some massive vulnerability hits, nobody will get sudo permission on any of my workstations without physically sitting here and tapping it. This is highly recommended for office setups. Even more so is Blueproximity which can automatically lock/unlock your screen if you walk away and the bluetooth signal in your phone or watch gets too weak. These aren’t exclusive to Linux but they’re definitely a nice touch if you’re in close quarters with others. If only Blueproximity could warn me of nearby COVID infections, but I guess that’s the challenge presented by experimental tracking apps.
I do have some favourite tools too. The ultimate apps for my daily life and what I recommend installing for people in tech or who deal with tech demos and talks. Most of these apps can be simply installed from repositories. I’ll be sure to add/update this list as I think of them:
- Zoom+Teams+Meet+Hangouts+Bluejeans: All of these apps now have fairly solid Linux support. Cisco Webex, Amazon Chime, and GoTo Webinar are pretty much unusable without a Windows VM in my experience. Even browser-based options are offered for some of these which is fantastic. If your laptop fan goes crazy and you get overheating while on video conferences try an external USB webcam. Some modern laptops and MacBooks in particular use a special PCI bus to the webcam for raw video which chokes the CPU with processing video. Most USB webcams have hardware video encoders which work much better in my experience and will also help your battery last longer.
- Vagrant: Our own HashiCorp Vagrant is still 100% free and open and is great for standing up local environments for demos or testing where cloud doesn’t make sense. Sometimes networks are airgapped or cloud budgets are unnecessary. The only paid option for Vagrant is the VSphere plugin which costs just $79 online.
- KVM / LibVirt: This open emulation manager Qemu paired with LibVirt and KVM virtualization has been critical to public cloud proliferation. Not only can it be used locally to test exotic or rare environments but it’s also the backbone of most current cloud hypervisors. Nobody could afford to run a public cloud with thousands of server racks if they had to pay for commercial hypervisors. Red Hat bought Qumranet the group building KVM back in 2008 but the project is still very open. Cloud providers have all settled on KVM or their own forks (HVM) as a free virtualization platform. HashiCorp Nomad does very simple QEMU VM clustering, and I’ve always been a big proponent of oVirt which can be managed with Vagrant or Terraform. This combination provides a fantastic energy efficient virt and hybrid cloud solution. OpenStack tried to build an open cloud management on top of these layers but it really hasn’t gone well. Sales teams positioned OpenStack as a replacement for VMWare which was a disaster — oVirt has always been the actual open source VMWare alternative. In my opinion OpenStack suffered death by foundation, where everybody fought over project direction until it was fractured beyond recognition and nobody wanted to use it. This includes myself while I was at Red Hat tasked with selling it which was a bad situation to find myself in. There are still users but not nearly as many as were initially projected. The good news is there are still plenty of other open management options around KVM and private/hybrid cloud operations.
- Peek. Peek is a superb GIF screen recorder. Select the area you want to record and it will be saved as GIF. Even our Google Docs support this now, so if I’m describing a UX feature or demonstrate a bug I can show in a document exactly how to reproduce it.
- SimpleScreenRecorder: For full-screen video/audio recordings @ 4k.
- VS Code: Paired with HashiCorp extensions, this is a must for anyone working with our stack. Microsoft and the open source community have a masterpiece with this. Visual Studio is still available for full-featured IDEs, but VS Code is a lighter IDE similar to the infamous Atom editor which is a healthy balance of light and functional.
- Xamarin/MonoDevelop: I have also long been a proponent of Xamarin’s MonoDevelop IDE. This was basically an open rewrite of Visual Studio using Mono. Microsoft quietly purchased Xamarin in 2016 and targeted versions since 6.0 towards mobile development but MonoDevelop 5.x is still widely available in the open and I actually think both versions are some of the best IDE options around. Thinking back to my childhood I was lucky my family could buy a Performa 475 and I could buy a book which contained a lite version of a commercial IDE to start learning how to code. These days any kid with a paper route can get this free software working on a $20 Raspberry Pi. It’s a great time to be young.
- Compiz: KDE and Compiz give the feel of having four or more screens in one. In fact with a customizable desktop cube you can set how many screens you have. It's much simpler to have one screen and let it act as four than to be overwhelmed with screens.
- KDE + KDE Connect: This app makes it super simple to integrate your mobile and wearable devices with your PC. Once anything is plugged into KDE’s Plasma notifications you are able to enable/disable exactly the notifications you want, and they will be bidirectional mobile/wearable to PC and PC to mobile/wearable. It’s crazy but I even have a smart pet flap that notifies me when a pet has entered or left. If it bugs me I can just mute it.
Conclusion
Business looking to squeeze budgets during the recession often find value in open source alternatives to some of their more expensive projects. This in turn drives open source market share growth and sets up open source ISVs for a nice boost during recovery as budgets return. If you’re looking to save some on your workspace or your business definitely evaluate replacing some of your proprietary tech with open source. If you find value in any of our own offerings at HashiCorp we’re happy to upgrade you with Enterprise support for mission critical deployments.
It will be interesting to see how this recession plays out. I think the business environment is quite a bit different this time around as cloud adoption and software subscription models have offered startups instant infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go pricing model vs the massive capital expenses and risk brought with large hardware purchases that were necessary in recent recessions.
