Open Source Companies' Reputation Problem With Chris Holmes  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Business of Open Source]] - Full Title: Open Source Companies' Reputation Problem With Chris Holmes - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/374d26db-167d-4102-a007-bb94d9201db7 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Gray Matter's Honest Open Source Stance** - Chris Holmes shares Gray Matter's honest approach that it is not truly an open source company. - They write management automation on top of open source but avoid bait-and-switch tactics like misleading customers about product openness. Transcript: Chris Holmes So gray matter as a whole is not open source. And I don't like playing the games and I never liked playing the games of advertising gray matter as an open source solution. Then baiting and switching customers saying, we don't, we don't really have an open source solution that is open source, but we take that open source and we package it and we have our Own fork because there's a lot of other things we need to add. I think that is a bait and switch strategy. I think some of my competitors do that kind of strategy. I hate it. I think it's poor, poor experience for customers. I think it's a way for salespeople to get in the door. Hey, we're an SDO company, but not really. So we never took that tact ever. I'm very blatant about the fact that we wrote a management automation piece of software on top of open source capabilities. And in some cases, we certainly facilitate and augment our own layer in that management plane. All of the work that we've put into supporting 5G and, and IOT devices this year. But I'm also adamant that when I go to a customer, telco or whoever, and the customer tells me that they're using open 5GS or free 5GC, which are open, open source implementations of the 5G core infrastructure that, that they can continue to use the open source versions and that I lay on top of those without manipulation. Same thing with Istio. If you're using Istio, we can lay our management automation layer on top of it and you do not need to touch your Istio environment. We will augment your Istio environment appropriately. But in our case, especially in the case of Service Mesh, we will act as our own Service Mesh. So if you're not using Istio, we can do all of the things that Istio does with probably a number of other things that Istio can't do just because of the IP embedded in that management automation Layer. And ([Time 0:04:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/880d462c-05b2-4232-bd88-5f2dc4cc0322)) - **Open Source Purchase Fears** - Customers often worry buying from one company means forced enterprise software purchases from others. - This fear reflects broader open source risks around dependency and surprise costs impacting trust. Transcript: Chris Holmes They're used at scale and then they have to pay for them and the bill's usually not cheap. I have a lot of customers. It's funny, when we go in and we're talking to different customers, one of the questions that I get recently, which is relevantly new, is what dependencies do you have on other open source Solutions that you force me to buy the enterprise version. And the first time I heard that, I was taken aback. I was like, what? Emily O'Meara Let me make sure that I understand that. So what dependencies do you have? So is the question, what dependencies do you have that will force me to buy your enterprise version or that will force me to buy those other guys's others see so so they know they're going Chris Holmes To pay for really interesting they know they're going to pay for mine because because again i'm transparent yeah whether that's a pro or con they know they know that my automation management Plane itself the platform is a i'm upfront about that we leverage grafana we leverage elastic search we leverage a lot of these other things we leverage spire we automate spiffy inspire Out of the box a hundred percent and i said earlier when we do that we don't manipulate the open source if we need something done on a, like the CSI plugin, we needed something specific Done, we'll either work with the Spire group or we'll either do it ourselves and put it in there. We will not fork anything and create a fork for our customers. That puts them at risk, quite frankly. A cybersecurity risk, an operations risk, all kinds of things downstream that a lot of people just don't, they take for granted. Emily O'Meara So your customers are worried that because they buy from you, they're going to end up getting forced to buy from other people too. Chris Holmes One of them specifically, specifically recently, one of them said, is this going, we're using Prometheus and we're using Grafana at scale. All open source, we've got it in our enterprise and it works great. We're not paying for it. We don't want to pay for it. And the gentleman was adamant. He said, is this going to make me have to pay for Grafana Professional? They call me every day. I don't want, they know, I mean, all these companies know that they're downloading and using their software at open source. So it's just, I mean, it's free sales. And he was adamant. He was like, I do not want to pay for that. We have it working. And I was, again, I was taken aback. I was like, no, we don't, we don't manipulate anything under the covers. ([Time 0:09:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/531e0fd8-4ae7-4d69-ba08-e671e1bf25b0)) - **Open Source Reference vs Full Solution** - Reference model open source projects minimize risk by providing minimal viable implementations. - Full solution open source projects invite monetization issues and customer lock-in fears. Transcript: Chris Holmes I do think that that's a problem. And I think that that's partially why some of this has happened the way it's happened. I think in that case scenario, you would have to have companies that will spend their dollars. I have limited dollars. I still try to do some stuff. I wish I could do more, but I, but I, but I'm not huge. But it, but it requires the large companies, the fortune 100 companies to put their, put their mouth or put their, what is it? What is the saying? Money, put the money where their mouth is. I mean, they would literally, you know, you've got these big companies like Amazon and you've got Google and you've got, and it's more than just sitting on open source consortium ports. It's literally financing a group and saying, your job is going to actually be just to maintain this. I mean, somebody pays for go. They don't, nobody works for free. And there's no expectation on the backend that, that there's going to be, you know, some huge unicorn coming out of this. And I think that's how open source started. I really do. I do think that the investment community has really complicated this because what they looked at was, um, it's open source. Again, they look at it from a, from a perspective of how can I, how can I generate money? ([Time 0:16:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/206455ba-1422-4597-b1fe-ee3e6475a39d)) - **Advice for Selling to Government** - Engage government markets by leveraging their incubation programs and submitting solicitations or data calls. - Build relationships through meetings and participation; sales cycles are longer but deals tend to be sticky. Transcript: Chris Holmes I mentioned to you that I'm heading to Luxembourg in a couple of weeks. What I will tell you is every country, the United States is no different. Every country has mechanisms. Luxembourg has this thing called Lux Innovation. And the United States, DOD has Air Force Works, AFWERX, Softworks. They all have these sort of incubation programs. I'm actually working on something right now for the Defense Innovation Unit, DIU, that they do these data calls. And from these data calls, yeah, you got to write a little bit of a paper. You've got to write a little bit of a solicitation. If your marketing is up to snuff, it should be lightweight. But there are processes where you can submit. It doesn't guarantee you're going to win. It doesn't guarantee even you're going to get a phone call. But, you know, it's a step. And they start seeing you. They start seeing your logo. Setting up meetings, finding out who is in those groups, and setting up face-to meetings. It's one thing to just randomly send an email to somebody, but it's a totally different thing. If you get on lists, they have industry days. They will often help you set up meetings because that is their job. And if you're a US-based company going into Europe, for example, they have grants and programs that will literally help you establish those types of relationships up front. So there's a lot of relationship building. It is a longer sales cycle. But on the flip side is, you know, you become a trusted asset. So it's much easier to nail down work and make a good chunk of money when you start from that point. So upfront work, once you're there, really sticky, really sticky kind of work. Really good people to work with. Starving for good solid innovation starving for modernization not always easy they're they're often have use cases and and what the department of defense calls denied disrupted Intermittent and limited impacted bandwidth areas which is partially why we've jumped so far forward into 5G and Internet of Things with service mesh and service connectivity technology. But, you know, it is doable. And like I said, it's usually very good, sticky work. As long as you do a good job, you've got to perform and you've got to be able to provide what you say you provide. ([Time 0:22:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ea012ec4-e5eb-442f-8a65-08ac9a16a0f8)) - **Public Sector Easier Procurement** - Selling to public sector agencies is easier due to standardized procurement processes. - Fortune 500 procurement is centralized, making uniform buying across divisions feasible compared to decentralized smaller entities. Transcript: Chris Holmes For us, it's way easier to sell to the public sector. Much easier. We know the space. We know how it works. I will say, I didn't, that part of the answer should have been, you really do need to sort of study how a particular group, the one thing I will say about the federal government is when you Know how the mechanical procurement process works, it is in fact cookie cutter across the entire federal government. It's not like the Air Force has a different procurement process than the Army. It isn't even like the Navy has a different procurement source process than the Department of Interior. I mean, they're all the same. The procurement process and the mechanics of said procurement process are exactly the same. So that makes it, in fact, in my opinion, easier across the board. Every single corporate does procurement different, every single one. ([Time 0:30:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/61f95618-3706-4c1d-9ff8-8c10b2cb69ad)) - **Value of Maintaining Envoy Control Plane** - Maintaining the Envoy Go control plane grants Gray Matter critical insight into the service mesh landscape. - They leverage open source projects like Envoy, QLang, and Spire as foundational blocks for their automation and security layers. Transcript: Emily O'Meara And my first question here is, what do you see as the advantage to Gray Matter in being one of the maintainers of the Go Envoy control plane? Chris Holmes Insight into where the service mesh space is, 100%. I mean, at our core, we couldn't do anything without Envoy or our service mesh. We could hit all of the service mesh functionality. GigaOM just released their radar report. We did really, really well in that report. Because as a standalone service mesh, I mean, we're very good. I would say we're probably equal or better than STO for various reasons, but we're very good. STO's free, we're not, so there's that. But that maintaining, that maintainership and that support and involvement in that community, and quite frankly others, really lets us see what's happening in the service mesh market Space. I mentioned some others. We're huge, huge, huge proponents of Q and QLang. Love Paul. I think that team is doing some really, really good things. We have gone all in on Q. Our playbook management system for automation, in fact, is based on QLine. I think, unlike some others, we put Q right in front of the user, the DevOps person. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's bad. Pros and cons to always making choices. Some DevOps guys are like, this is fantastic and so easy to work with and a little bit more, feels like a little bit more like an object oriented or a scripting language. And then some are like, it's not hell. And it's like, well, there's a reason why it's not. But we love Q. And again, we wouldn't be able to provide the layers of automation that we provide without it. Often call in, often put, we don't, I don't, I wouldn't say we actively write anything in the core Q environment. We've talked about it, but again, that goes to my size. But we are very active in their community forums, very active working with them on early betas or alphas, tests, getting testing in. We're currently working on our 2.0. We've been actively pulling in their alpha builds. So that's been very useful. Another open source platform that we leverage heavily, almost the same way as Q, is the Spire group. I mean, we've studied what others are doing. Spire works really well, really well. And Evan and his team do a very, very nice job of maintaining that environment. Often, again, we'll pull in alphas. We'll run them through our test cycles. I will be honest, and we're pretty upfront with our customer base. Sometimes we will deploy alpha or beta open source because we feel that it's ready to go and we'll just give them an upgrade path. It's not the same type of versioning that an enterprise system would go through, but really good piece of software, really good piece software that we pull in. We automate end to end. That's pretty unique. I think what we've done with, with our Q management playbook models, uh, and we've created our own DSL to do this, um, with Spire, with service mesh technologies to literally stand up A service mesh in minutes. We couldn't do any of that without open source. We need these open source solutions in order to do that level of automation. ([Time 0:33:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d933f35-0b6b-4bca-a832-ad303fbd328e)) - **Complexity in Open Source Market** - The open source market is overly complicated by niche products and scattered solutions. - Buyers struggle to understand choices and vendor roles, creating market challenges and confusion. Transcript: Chris Holmes Should it not be in the report? And that gets to, it's a library versus it's a full stack solution. If it's a full stack solution, who's in the report? Is the solution in the report or is the vendor that's behind the solution in the report. I think that is, is the most complicated thing for us in our market is, is that fidelity of, there is no box, there's no quad chart you can point your finger at and say this. I also think that there's a plethora of niche companies. I'm one of them, frankly. There's more niche companies than there have ever been in the history of man. So, I mean, you can literally buy a passkey system, as an example, a credential management system for users as a one-off, but then you've got to integrate it to do anything. You can buy a service mesh as a one-off, but then you've got to integrate it to do anything. You can buy an API gateway, but then you've got to buy a bunch of other stuff to do anything. So there's a lot of little things like that. And I think that that is the bigger challenge. Now, am I saying that the flip side is better? No, I don't think it is. I think that more choice is better. I think that people that need to describe all of that choice need to be better. ([Time 0:41:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c1d3e0bf-ca20-4746-8eae-aa4bcdda962d))