There’s a lot of wishful thinking in “The Value of Open Source in the Cloud Era,” a recent IBM-commissioned O’Reilly Media survey.
For example, there’s the finding that 70% of the more than 3,400 respondents “prefer cloud providers based on open source.” This sounds great until you ask, “What does it mean to be “based on open source?” After all, every single software product in existence arguably fits that description. And then there’s the finding that 79% turn to open source in the cloud because it somehow prevents vendor lock-in. (This is, as I wrote back in 2016, a bit ridiculous, for a variety of reasons.)