Reluctantly agreeing with you. So.. you can’t trust a small shop because an MBA corp dev team at some enterprise shop is always lurking around the corner. But if you go to the behemoth instead, you can get equally screwed because you don’t mean anything to their bottom line (see exhibit Google). The commercial software “service” industry is really fucked. I don’t want another tech bust, but we sure as hell deserve one.
I feel like we learned 20 years ago that buying proprietary software has a bunch of problems, so we switched to open source software. But in the last 10 years, we started buying software services, and now we have all those problems back again (corporate stability, vendor lock-in, principal agent problems, etc.). Maybe we will learn how to run our own software at some point without fully staffed teams of SREs?
Because along the way the people creating open source software also have bills to pay, and found out that living outside Hotel Mama comes with own set of caveats.
