Personally, this OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston was the fourth summit where I could watch the beginning and the end of the event. Moreovoer, for the two years, the keywords presented by OpenStack have changed. In this summit, the keywords were unclear, but if I personally point out the keywords of this summit, they might be 'Private Cloud 2.0' and 'Leading Community' rather than 3C. In particular, over the past year, the overall status of the project has risen, making it the centerpiece of related projects and communities.

In particular, one of the parts highlighted in recent summits is collaborate with the communities and projects that are often used with OpenStack. Typically, having been raised importance from the past summits, the collaboration with other communities has begun a new phase with the advent of the “open-source day” program this year. At the same time, ‘container’ and Kubernetes project were also actively covered in this summit, which made me feel like they are the two main characters of the summit.

On the other hand, since the venue was the mainland of the United States, many of the people and companies participated were from English-speaking countries, but it was able to find the presence of Asian countries, China and Japan. In particular, every single case of China the largest scale in the world. In Korea, however, I could only meet Korean participants and there was no session operated by Korean companies, so I felt a little bit bitter when thinking of what I saw and heard about the view of open-source in Korea.


The biggest reasons of ‘standard technology’ and ‘open-source’ spreading throughout the IT industry like a trend are considered to be the desire for independence from technological subordination and the reflection of companies that have been controlled by technical aspects. This is the difference between who takes the lead in technology change. If the whole business has been controlled by technology companies that have technology so far, "standards-based" will remove vested interests of several companies in the flow of this change and “open-source” will provide an opportunity for companies that have been in the customer position to change this flow.

In fact, it is not the individual developers who lead the current open-source communities. It has long been a battleground for leading global companies to actively participate in communities and bring the flow of the whole project to their favor through competition in technology development and contribution. Of course, as it is not always possible to fight in a battlefield and the branches cannot extend infinitely, it is desirable to go in a way that everyone can compromise through their own negotiation.

Hence, in accessing open-source solutions, it is quite dangerous to simply approach with ‘cost'. If the most basic 'open-sources’ presently available do not fit the current needs, modification and development will be needed. Also, the attempts to take the lead of direction by contributing to communities can be made. If you approach open-source just because you will use it like you used to and it seems cheaper, you will pay a lot for it later. I think it would be more appropriate to look at the long-term sustainability rather than the cost.


After the summit, I felt the domestic market, which is proud to be an IT powerhouse and a symbolic market, is very rare in participation and contribution related to open-source. Even if it is not OpenStack, Korean market seems to be a market with unique and exclusive Galapagos-like characteristics in the global market. In particular, it is extremely biased toward “consumption” rather than the production of solution, and it also has a characteristic that the result of production that fits the market has almost no contribution to the outside.

In the Korean market where IT cannot take the lead in organizations, most of the introduced cases are about ‘construction’ and 'consumption’. The existing company that was in charge of the ‘technological lead’ constructs the consumption model, and the passive consumption model that seems to be active is a comfortable model in some ways. Hence, it is important to send out responsibility for the construction in Korea. And, I think that the SIs mobilized as proven external organizations made an invisible situation in aspect of contribution even in the age of open-source.

In some cases, this may appear in government regulations or projects. For example, in defining the conditions that a business or service-related framework should have, there is a comment that specifying a product name rather than a definition of a condition would have been possible in the old days, but it is not appropriate in the community age in which a number of crossroads and distributions based on the same technology exist. This case becomes not-opened situation although it is based on open-source, so I am worried that the end will be not much different from the old generation.


Like the way the cookie crumbles, one of the basic rules of the open-source community would be ‘give and take’. If there is something to receive, there must be something to give. Of course, it is normal to be the top of the license conditions that are applied to open-source. As long as we use it, if we create something another with it, everyone’s development will be achieved by returning it to the community. In addition, based on that rule, I think Korean market does not show any preparation, attitude, and performance to accept open-source. It is okay to simply buy and use an open-source based product, but there will be nothing to change.

Also, there has consistently been controversy about ‘Korean type'. It made a flow of its own ignoring the world’s flow as well as shouting independent system such as the certification system in finance, represented by ‘ActiveX’, and now, there is a feeling that it passed the time to go back. If this was the way the debate was going on in the open community form, there could be a different outcome.

Meanwhile, I recently saw a bitter news. It is news that a domestic company has been accused of violating GPL in using foreign open-source based libraries. I think this happened because the company only saw open-source as a free consumption model. Open-source is not free, and it is the way of the world to give as much as you received. Moreover, not only in politics but also in information and communication technology, we have to move and try by ourselves to move the world in the way we want.


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