Enterprise software is, in general, garbage. I can write that line without fact-checking it and Republicans and Democrats alike will nod their heads. But why? Why is it so bad? According to open source veteran Matt Wilson, “Because the people building the software are not using it to solve problems.” They’re vendors, not end users.
In a hopeful sign, however, the long-awaited end-user driven open source future might finally be arriving. Take Envoy, for example, an open source edge and service proxy developed at Lyft by Matt Klein. In my recent conversation with Klein, he argued that unlike open source projects spawned by VC-backed startups, Envoy came with a built-in, “captive customer,” which “forces you to really think about things like operational quality, making sure that you’re building features that people actually care about.”