March 27, 2020

Full Value a VC and CIO on monetizing open source

A16Z’s podcast with Peter Levine and Mike Kelly is worthwhile for those looking to better understand the venture-capital and enterprise view of open source business models, as well as the relationship of open source to software as a service. Peter Levine is a VC and the author of “Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat”. Mike Kelly is the CIO of Red Hat.

The key takeaway for me was the speakers’ shared revelry in the ability of software-as-a-service companies to monetize the full value of their services, including all the open source used to make and run them. First because customers don’t care whether the service is open or not. Second because there aren’t competitive offerings unbundling the open and closed code available to motivate price comparisons.