Chef cofounder on CentOS: It's time to open source everything

Commentary: Red Hat has been in hot water about changing the way CentOS operates, but that model looks like the exact right way for open source entrepreneurs to operate.Red Hat switched up CentOS to make it less of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone and more of a feeder project into RHEL (as Fedora was always supposed to be, yet wasn’t). “If I do an open source strategy for a company ever again, I will own the upstream, it will be fully open source, and I’ll happily collaborate with anyone downstream.” But not just an open upstream–it’s also important to, “Produce a commercial distribution [and c]ollaborate on downstream non-commercial ones, in the open,” he argued.What does he mean by “upstream” and “downstream”? It’s therefore far better to condition people to participate as collaborators with an open source project, and through the commercial distribution to also condition users to become customers, if they want the certified distribution.One way that open source companies are doing this model to fantastic effect is by open sourcing their upstream and creating a cloud distribution (read: managed service).