Was haben Google, Facebook, Twitter und Instagram gemeinsam? Open Source als Basis.

Glyn Moody für Computerworld UK:

[..]there are lots of multi-billion dollar turnover companies that are based on open source – Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. – it’s just that they don’t make money off it directly.

Another company that is open source through and through has done rather well recently. Everyone and their dog must know by know that Instagram is being bought by Facebook for $1 billion, but less well known is the fact that the company is built entirely on open source.

Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung von Open Source, das massgeblich für das kosteneffiziente Betreiben von großen Webdiensten verantwortlich ist, wird oft unterschätzt oder überhaupt nicht beachtet. Tatsächlich wären wir heute nicht ansatzweise wo wir mit dem Netz sind, wenn wir kein starkes Open-Source-Ökosystem hätten.

Ein weiteres Beispiel wie Wohlfahrt entsteht, weil bewusst auf exklusive Rechte und ihre Beschränkungen verzichtet wird.

Instagram hat vor ein paar Monaten vorgestellt, wie die Technik dort aufgesetzt wird:

We run Ubuntu Linux 11.04 (“Natty Narwhal”) on Amazon EC2. We’ve found previous versions of Ubuntu had all sorts of unpredictable freezing episodes on EC2 under high traffic, but Natty has been solid. We’ve only got 3 engineers, and our needs are still evolving, so self-hosting isn’t an option we’ve explored too deeply yet, though is something we may revisit in the future given the unparalleled growth in usage.

(Hervorhebung von mir.)

Glyn Moody:

the key takeaway is this: if you are startup, you would be crazy not to use open source products, probably running them in the cloud for future scalability. Indeed, I suspect that there are very few startups of any kind that would use anything else by now. After all, why pay for costly closed-source infrastructure software when all the high-profile success stories are running open source from top to bottom? Do you really want to bet they’re doing it wrong?

Cloud + Open Source = Voraussetzung für Erfolg.