Thread by @QuinnyPig

And now, an @awscloud #oscon panel including @adamhjk, @_msw_, @vmbrasseur, @mjasay, @zahedab, and @farriss.

And not me. I feel the need to be very, very clear on this point.

Citation:

I also found @alexwwood!

And @DeirdreS!

"Who here is active on Twitter? Huh, not all of you." Correct. You can tell the folks who aren't on Twitter because they have smiles on their faces and a spring in their step.

To @mjasay: "You've built a lot of business models around open source. What's working?"

"Uh, first I've gotta say I'm a bit nervous when @quinnypig is live tweeting me. I've always seen him do this to other people, but never to me."

"I've seen a lot of companies consuming from the community, and giving back as little as possible." -- @mjasay Let 50,000 companies fear subtweets.

"I know we're at an @awscloud event, but how do we avoid being consumed by Amazon?" @mjasay cites a license that was designed to keep Amazon at bay.

"That's the latent fear in the industry."

The followup question from an Amazonian seems very concerned that there may have been a company that they hadn't taken a stab at driving out of business.

"The company was @mongodb" interjects @adamhjk. Amazon relaxes; DocumentDB has that well in hand.

Now talking about the approach @chef takes.

Everyone likes Chef. The crowd relaxes. The Amazonians are distracted by trying to drive their own @awscloud OpsWorks for Chef Automate out of business instead of Chef proper.

To compete with AWS; turn their attentions inward!

Now @_msw_ has captured the microphone, along with the crowd's hearts. He reminds us of a simpler time: the 1980s, by way of his shirt.

And @vmbrasseur brings the conversation around to Cloud. "It's easier to blame Amazon than it is to look at deeper societal issues. Sorry, Amazon, you're the biggest whipping boy on the planet."

Well, on the stage certainly...

"Things were great once--and then it stopped. The evangelism died. Now most of the new generation doesn't know there's a single defintion of 'open source.'" -- @vmbrasseur, dropping insightful truths that HackerNews can't wait to bikeshed.

"Is this a developer problem?" -@mjasay
"This extends to everyone. Source available isn't open source. I can't build on something without a license or my auditors will freak out!" --@vmbrasseur

"The fact that people are choosing open source software without knowing it's open source is a testament to how good of a job we've done." --@farriss

Now @farriss is talking about newcomers not knowing the community norms.

Oh my god she's talking about Eternal September.

Now @mjasay questions @_msw_. First about his fashion sense, then about Open Distro for ElasticSearch. Everyone has questions about it:

"I know you've got a customer fetish--sorry, customer obsession. " Then @mjasay has the temerity to blame me for his misquote!

Then @_msw_ has to walk the tightrope of saying "@elastic had it coming" without saying it out loud.

In the wake of the Open Distro I reached out to all parties. Elastic stonewalled me; AWS provided a pile of people to talk on-record.

At first I was opposed to the Open Distro for ElasticSearch. Then I started talking to a number of people across the industry who worked for neither party with strong open source backgrounds. My opinion changed significantly.

Now @adamhjk talks about what he'd do if he was starting a software company. "I'd figure out whether open sourcing it made sense." It's a nuanced question. Now cites Sublime Text.

"It's a channel, but I have to put the commitments of community against my outcomes."

"Hey, IBM made more money out of Chef than Chef ever did, but you don't see me yelling at them, despite how much I may want to." Unsure if it's Wear Suits IBM or Dirty Hippie Acquisition IBM @adamhjk is talking about.

"I'd do a heck of a lot of thinking before I'd open source software that I built my company on top of." --@vmbrasseur

"Should I take the $5 million a VC offers me?"

"HELL YES, it feels great!" --@adamhjk, whom drinks this evening are upon.

"If you host a service as a cloud provider better than the open source company who built it, that's not the problem of open source itself." --@vmbrasseur dropping hard truths with which shortsighted VCs are incentivezed to disagree.

Now @vmbrasseur talks about business sustainability from the 1980s. @_msw_ sits there in quiet solidarity with the 80s in that what we'll generously call "a shirt."

"We don't have an open source sustainability problem; we may have an open source company sustainability problem." --@mjasay threatening a bunch of founder models before they can silence him in the night.

"A company can die. A community hopefully won't." --@mjasay The Rust community talks amongst themselves in agreement. Lord do they ever talk...

Closing quote time!

"Figure out a plan. Set expectations. Understand what you're building and why, write it down. Use it to inform the decisions you're making." --@_msw_ turning creation into a book report

"If we're going to keep open source open, we need to shift from a notion of transparency to one of clarity." --@farriss

*SOMETHING SO LOUD IT DEFIES TRANSCRIPTION* --@_msw_'s shirt

"Have a clarity of purpose around what your plan is. Don't change midstream." --@adamhjk

"Focus on the customer. If you're focused on competitors we're just kicking the can down the road." --@mjasay interviews for a job at AWS via leadership principles

"You have limited resources as a company, so figure out where you should be investing. Listen to @swardley." --@vmbrasseur earning the LEF sponsorship dollars

And that ends the panel! Next up is a very frank conversation in a back room with me, the panelists, and a few broken beer bottles.