Open Source vs. Cloud Castles
How Open Source Startups are Competing with the Big 3
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In my previous essay, I explored strategies for how cloud startups can compete with “Big 3” cloud providers – breaking up their dominance by avoiding them, or going up the stack, or building deep IP.
There’s another strategy that startups can consider when going up against Big Cloud: Open Source.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux “a cancer.” But Microsoft’s $7.5B acquisition of Github shows how far Microsoft and the entire industry of vendors and customers have come from cautiously using open source to embracing it.