Open source won because it needs no purchase order

Open source software is now running a serious share of enterprise infrastructure, and almost none of it got there by being chosen.

The story told at conferences is about evaluation. A committee compares options, weighs licensing costs against support guarantees, considers the strategic merits of avoiding lock-in, and reaches a decision. That process does happen. It is not how Linux and MySQL ended up in these buildings.

What happened is that a developer needed a database for something on a Tuesday and did not want to spend six weeks getting a licence approved. So they downloaded one. It worked, the project shipped, other things started depending on it, and eighteen months later a system the business cannot function without is running on software nobody bought.

The decisive property of open source in the enterprise is not that it is free of charge. It is that it arrives without a purchase order.

That is an enormous advantage and it is almost never described honestly, because describing it honestly means admitting that adoption ran through people with no signing authority, which flatters nobody in management.

You can read the business models that grew around this as a direct consequence. Red Hat is not selling an operating system to someone deciding between operating systems. It is selling a support contract to a company that already runs Linux everywhere and has belatedly noticed it has no one to call at three in the morning. The product is retrospective legitimacy, sold to the finance department, for software the technical staff installed years earlier.

Which is a good business, and also a narrow one. You cannot charge much for a contract covering something the customer is currently getting away with for nothing, and the customer knows precisely what the alternative costs, because they have been running it.

The part I would watch is what happens when the same route stops being available. It works because a developer can install software on a machine without asking. If deployment moves somewhere that requires a card number and a contract before anything runs, the frictionless path closes, and the advantage that actually drove twenty years of adoption disappears while everyone is still discussing licences.

Nobody is going to notice that happening, because everyone will be looking at the licence terms, which were never the mechanism.