“The cloud model (ie hosted by a trusted partner) becomes attractive from the perspective of repeatability, from the efficiency of doing the same thing repeatedly at scale.”
From, “I want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge.”
OSS struggles when it comes to repeatability. Often within an organisation, but almost always when comparing between organisations. That’s why there’s so much fragmentation, which in turn is holding the industry back because there is so much duplicated effort and brain-power spread across all the multitude of vendors in the market.
I’ve worked on many OSS projects, but none have even closely resembled each other, even back in the days when I regularly helped the same vendors deliver to different clients. That works well for my desire to have constant mental stimulation, but doesn’t build a very efficient business model for the industry.
Closed loop architectures are the way of the future for OSS, but only if we can make our solutions repeatable, measurable / comparable and hence, refinable (ie improvable). If we can’t then we may as well forget about AI. After all, AI requires lots of comparable data.
I’ve worked with service providers that have prided themselves on building bespoke solutions for every customer. I’m all for making every customer feel unique and having their exact needs met, but this can still be accommodated through repeatable building blocks with custom tweaks around the edges. Then there are the providers that have so many variants that you might as well be designing / building / testing an OSS for completely bespoke solutions.
You could even look at it this way – If you can’t implement a repeatable process / solution, then measure it, then compare it and then refine it, then you can’t create a customer offering that is improving.