[Pdns-users] [Pdns-dev] An important update on new PowerDNS Products

[bert hubert]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 01:27:57PM +0000, Justin Clift wrote:
>  > We would therefore like to clarify that we regard our core Open Source
> >  products as our crown jewels
> 
> This seems to be missing the reason why the new "Platform" is better off
> non-OSS?

Hi Justin,

That is because it is not universally better. I think you personally might
find the "Platform" to be worse even!  But read on for why.

The best explanation may be found in the second to last link in the blogpost
or email (if you have HTML email) on
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/06/its-actually-open-source-software-thats-eating-the-world/

About successful open source businesses, it says:

"They’ve figured out that customers are more than happy to pay for an
enterprise-grade version of the complete product, which may have security,
management, or integration enhancements and come with support. And they also
understand that keeping this type of functionality proprietary won’t
alienate the community supporting the project the way something such as a
performance enhancement would."

Basically everything in the Platform is something you could build/hook
yourself.  You and I personally could do that easily, and the companies
where we work would probably prefer that.  In business this is referred as
'best of breed approach'.  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BestOfBreed calls it:

".. the strategy of selecting the best product of each type
(and integrating them yourself), rather than selecting one large integrated
solution from a single vendor.".

Not every company is like that though: they may prefer something that comes
with loads of integrated features (graphing, failover, monitoring, graphical
user interface, configuration audit trail etc) out of the box.

Ideally, our "Platform" would consist of features that most of our Open
Source friends would prefer to assemble themselves using the large amount of
hooks (Pipe, Remotebackend, our backend API, our RestFUL/JSON API, Lua
support, Carbon output, dnsdist DNSTAP (near future)) that we offer for that.

The problem we are solving here is making ourselves more accessible for
those places that do not in fact want to assemble all this themselves -
without closing down the very open PowerDNS software.

Does this help?

	Bert

> 
> Is it a case of wanting the Platform to be a competative differentiator?
> (GitHub style?)
> 
> + Justin