About
In this episode, I talked with Michael Meskes, the CEO of Credativ. Credativ is an open-source service provider best known for its PostgreSQL expertise.
Michael talked about experiences working with large corporations to help them implement and operate open-source software. Having been a lead maintainer of PostgreSQL for 25 years, Michael shared best practices for enterprises working with open source communities.
Transcript
hey hey hey everybody welcome back to the 12th episode of open source for business
brought to you by open teams my name is henry badri and i’m the growth marketer here at open teams
in this episode i was lucky enough to chat with michael meskes who is the ceo of creditive what’s creditive creditive
is an open source services provider that are best known for their work and expertise in postgresql michael talked about his
experiences working with some of the world’s largest companies to help them to integrate install and manage their open
source software michael has been a lead maintainer of the postgresql community for over 25 years now and so he shared
some great insights into what he thinks the best practices are for enterprises working with open source
communities this podcast is sponsored by open teams the first market network where users of open
source software can find vet and contract with service providers open teams is your single source for
everything open source now that the introductions are out of the way let’s cue the music
[Applause] so you are currently the ceo of creditive which is a service provider
for open source software and you’ve been a contributor to debian and the postgresql
community for over 20 years now is that correct that is correct i started with debian i
think in 95 maybe 94 somewhere in that range and post was a little bit later so yeah
it’s more like 25 years now wow that’s incredible and i’m sure you’ve seen a lot change over the years
and i think we definitely dive into that in a bit but can you give us an idea of
how you got here today yeah so um as you mentioned i started doing open source
originally in my spare time while i was working on my phd i got into some of the pieces i needed
some software i developed a little bit i gave back so the classical way you get into open
source way back when when it was really easy you send out an email you tell somebody
i would like to help and the reply is here’s your account please change the password there is no prs yeah that’s fairly easy
i later found out the the master server of debian was literally standing below somebody’s desk that’s it
so i i got into this as i said while i was doing my phd and then got into well the real life
doing different jobs and then um late in 1999
the company i was working for i was a branch manager of ranch uh running the the western branch of a
company based out of hamburg and the company was sold
and the the company acquiring us wasn’t really interested in the office in dusseldorf
so me and my friend who was working for me said okay so what do we do look for a new job maybe
we should look for something where we can keep working together and then somebody came up with the idea hey
why don’t we do it on our own just give it a try and we had a history in that job in
quality assurance quality management in i.t and that combined with my personal interest in open source
brought us there almost immediately well actually immediately because even back then the quality was
better you got more less problems with open source software we bootstrapped the
company so there is no well financing included
we did what we thought but made sense and we did what we saw in the market and saw what was needed and so why did
open source work better back then why did you say it was of higher quality well we’re talking about the days of uh
like windows 98 and stuff obviously the the servers on
unix systems were high quality but compared to some other software
open source already was of high quality the way open source software is developed just
results in higher quality there is there are so many uh testers
for this software because there are so many people using the software and using the bleeding edge version of it
that you automatically get a better version and you get the feedback you get those testers those users
talk to the developers directly or they are the developers so they can really put it in and the the
way i used to this or usually describe it is the classical software is often done or
has back then was done in what they call a waterfall model where you have the design and then the
development and everything just falls down and when you look at the real waterfall
what does it produce it produces mist and a lot of it um interestingly enough
um the same word mist is also a german word but means like crap in english okay so
you don’t want that yeah and this circle was already there in in
open source so you have the feedback and the software was good back then and obviously then people cut into it
saw the financial advantages so that they could get to market quicker with open source and all the other advantages
we see even nowadays what exactly is creative i know that i mentioned before it’s a service provider
but what are the other services you offer so um the the classical elevator pitch is
we offer all these services for open source that the software vendor offers for their own software
that’s like the whole lot the whole nine yards but in reality nowadays but back then we
did literally all of open source nowadays it’s no longer possible we concentrate on everything that’s
infrastructure and databases and most of the work we do is what we
call support it’s not the standard industry definition of support
standard industry definition of support is technical break fix you find something where the software is
broken you tell the vendor and they fix it but we found we do that too no problem
with that but most of the time the software is not broken most of the time they need users need operational support they have
to run the software and they run into issues there
and and if you’re obviously as a postgres developer i try to i tend to use databases as an example
quite frequently if your database is too slow to react you don’t really care if it’s a bug in
the software or it’s a missing tuning of the database itself or missing index or whatever
you just want to get it fixed so it’s faster and produces the time or the results you
need so for as a user for you that is the support ticket this query is too slow
um and we didn’t want to say well this is not support this is service just
contract us for consulting so we put all of that into one single what we call service and support
contract and do those operational support issue handle those operational support issues
within the sla as well how does the procurement process work what does that look like for the customers that you
work for well there are a lot of different setups um we still see that classical
procurement process where procurement people want to buy like a subscription or a license the
way they know that the way they know how to buy software or acquire software
but we also see people looking more for services understanding open source more way back
when it was a real difficult thing to do because everything you got was okay put the subscription price in here
and send us the software for two months we check it out and if we like it we pay
but you know in the open source world you don’t have that finished product all the time there are a lot of times
where you have different components and you need to combine them to integrate them into one
solution that is the work you have to do the service work if you want to say so
but you have to do that and you want to pay get paid for it and not just do it and wait for them to to
pay for it nowadays things have changed a lot of procurement divisions
understand open source at least to a certain extent and also because a lot of users go into
cloud or cloud-like setups they have a different approach if you go to big cloud provider and go
for let’s say a database as a service you don’t buy the software you buy compute
and storage and whatnot it’s just the software that runs uh your your uses your data or stores
your data and runs your queries um but they only build you for
hardware resources essentially so the interesting thing when cloud became cloud or
real thing before before cloud was a real thing let’s put it like that people were approaching me in
discussions and saying oh sorry dude your business model is going out of business essentially because nobody
needs you anymore the cloud providers will take care of it but that’s exactly what’s not going to
happen with what not didn’t happen and what the cloud providers explicitly don’t want to do
they want to give you that database and maybe the backup for it or the kubernetes infrastructure but
they don’t want to run it for you they don’t want to do a database health check or put the dba in a full service
solution for them is something else as it is for us for us full service means if you have a secret
problem in the database we fix it for you that is something the cloud provider doesn’t want to do
but there are huge advantages for open source because now these cloud providers develop
features develop software essentially and kubernetes is a great example because it’s completely coming out of
that space because they need it to serve their customers
and there is no advantage for them for not open sourcing it because they don’t sell it there are
huge possibilities for open source as compared to the old business models we saw in open source
over the years sometimes proprietary solutions or proprietary companies that are selling
proprietary software they try to trick you into buying their
license in order to use open source components some of those companies even claim they sell you an
open source version and an open source license but what they do is um they they take the open source
they claim it’s their product and they also claim you have to buy those proprietary pieces around it
because otherwise you cannot use the open source version right which more often than not is just
not true obviously they want to sell their products i’m fine with that but it’s not true what they’re saying
it’s not open and the best example i’ve seen was that company being asked for
well there was a problem running their product within a huge configuration management
system it’s probably a very easy issue i talked
to my technical team and they immediately said yeah it’s probably that they have to change this um but their salesperson went into the
customer and said oh yeah that’s a problem you shouldn’t use all that configuration management you put
i don’t know hundreds and thousands of man hours or man days into just throw it away and use our tools for
that piece of software and the rest we don’t care as you can imagine they didn’t go for
the software they just said oh thanks but no thanks and it’s just not needed
um and that’s what i meant with the the the advent of the of cloud and the
cloud providers changes things because they don’t have to go this fear uncertainty doubt rule route to
sell something in the other word the classical world
they were good examples of companies doing open source combining open source with proprietary pieces that give
additional features very very good companies very good solutions
but unfortunately there are also those what you call it black sheep or whatever
that sell that don’t have the solution or that don’t have enough clients or
customers interested that they think they have to go different routes and uh use the old fud arguments again
obviously sometimes it’s just sales people they don’t know the whole ecosystem but
sometimes there’s even a concept behind it do you think that’s changing have you noticed that are the less companies that
are doing that to be honest it’s quite the opposite
i’ve noticed more companies doing that that’s why i hope so much for the the cloud setups to change things
and it’s not just the cloud providers it’s also the cloud technologies that you run on prem um because then the whole basis of your
infrastructure is all open source anyway and people who already base their whole
infrastructure on open source are very tempted to keep everything open source as much as they can and not go
for any proprietary piece if there is an alternative can you give us an idea of who your customers are i
know you can’t name specific names but what do those custom customers look like usually
our customers are bigger companies so we don’t have that mom and pop shop
around the corner just not our business and we only do b2b we don’t have
uh anything but companies on the bigger end we are up to i don’t
know fortune 50 companies and we have quite a few of those bigger
global companies but also we see the middle size the company size of i don’t know
several thousand employees and almost always it’s very crucial infrastructure
they want us to support them with and what we also see more is a more global approach
more of a follow the sun approach where those big players i mean they have
somebody working on some systems around the clock and not just in three shifts they might
have somebody sitting in your place somebody in my area and somebody in the states for example
um and they would like to have people available for them without calling somebody
in the middle of the night their time so this follow the sun approach is something that
we see more and more what do you find is some of the biggest problems that these clients are facing um i would say
say the biggest problem is that they have to scale up really fast and
you design a system for a certain size and then suddenly the size triples or quadruples
within day so you need to make sure the whole system scales as well
and especially in the database you have to do quite a lot of things to figure out what’s going on i mean it doesn’t matter
you don’t have to um tune a database if you have like a thousand records in there
it doesn’t matter how you read them it’s fast but if you have like a thousand billion
then you have to tune a lot to make it fast you have to make sure it’s accessed in
the right way you have to see how does the application exercises and and so on
so there’s a huge point there and the other thing that unfortunately a lot of people
forget at least in the initial go is scaling up is fairly easy you set something up you set a threshold
if my um my cpu load goes over whatever or my
storage goes over whatever just start another part another container another system what
people tend to forget is at some point you have to shut it down again or otherwise the bill will
well the cost will skyrocket so there is a give and take you have to
add new things but you also have to remove things and all of this should be automatic
sometimes actually a lot of our clients prefer to have the
system on-prem at least the main system but then scale out into cloud
sometimes even into all three cloud providers um for handling the load that suddenly
comes up so all of this has to be integrated
wow okay so you’re the experts to go to when they when they need that to happen yeah that as well awesome well i’m gonna
shift gears a little bit and focus on um the idea of working with communities because i know that’s something you’ve
done personally for 25 years over 25 years now and i know that a lot of companies now
are more interested in working with open source communities so first of all though i just wanted to
touch on just for those listening what is postgresql so postgresql is
as we call it the most advanced open source database it’s an object relational database was
developed in berkeley by this same prof not the same team the same professor who did ingress way back
when and then in i think it was 95
berkeley decided that’s it we’ve done enough and gave it away for the communities and
then the small community built adding patches fixing bugs adding new features
and by now we’re at a point where i would say we can compete with all the major databases in the proprietary world
obviously it’s not always a hundred percent but most of the time most of the features are there and this
at more or less the same performance and when i was looking up it sat around the top three
uh open source database solutions honestly i don’t know what the top three
is in my book if you want a real full database it has to be postgres
because that’s the only full database and then you have a lot of nosql databases you also have the whole
mysql tree mariahdb mysql itself and so on all of these have the use cases don’t
get me wrong but i personally prefer the really
mission-critical business-critical big database and for that i believe
postgres is the best choice and the interesting that you said about lots of companies wanting to work with
communities i think there’s also a learning experience for
those companies yes just the other day i heard somebody
talking about a feature they want to open source are they going to open source
and he gave me a ring before they announced it and said you know what i talked to my legal team
and the first thing they said yeah get somebody to sign the nda well there is not somebody who can sign
for postgres well then get everyone to sign the nda nah that’s not going to happen either
how it works so yeah i get the point i mean um legal is different and they know
different setups and a lot of companies don’t know how to
interact with communities and there’s still some misconception i still get the occasional person who tells me
that they don’t believe in open source that they think as soon as developers develop a social
life they will be gone and don’t do open source anymore now it still happens can you talk about
the relationship that you yourself and creative have with postgresql and how does that benefit clients
yeah so uh postgres or other projects we do have a lot of debian developers we
have developers and committers in quite a lot of open source projects we have one
committee who’s doing some stuff on the monitoring side with the singer and i actually was wrecking my brain
about it just a couple minutes ago for a different reason but i couldn’t come up with all the the names
there were just too many um with postgres um i myself i’m still a committer i do
have right access to the whole postgres source code although i don’t find that much time anymore i fixed the occasional bug but i cannot do
feature development anymore turns out running a company our size we are about 90 people globally
takes away much more time than the day has so it’s not not much time
left for doing postgres development but obviously we are still connected we
have several people who do postgres work sometimes it’s sending in patches sometimes it’s
debugging issues answering queries on the mailing list
doing presentations there are a lot of things the community needs up to
handling sponsorships and everything so communities nowadays the bigger ones
have quite a bit of cash available because they have to run the infrastructure and everything but also for marketing issues
somebody has to manage all that so um some of our people are just involved
like just to give you an example there is um there’s a huge website where the
postgres community and the debian and the ubuntu community got together building packages for all
active versions of postgres for all active versions of debian and ubuntu yeah we’re talking about i should have
looked up the numbers something like 20 30 000 packages and that’s mostly run by
one of my guys for example so you give back what you can give back
and then sometimes it’s just our clients run into issues so we fix it for them and then contribute that back or we work
with a community to find a solution for the issue
it does benefit us it does benefit the clients what i don’t think but i’ve seen that
quite frequently i don’t think a user needs a committer as a service provider unless
they want to do software development feature development and even then it doesn’t help because there
is no committer at least not in postgres who can just commit anything
without going to a proper review with the whole community and sometimes it just happens that
people come to to us or even to myself and say well here is a feature i want
that committed yeah but there are issues yeah it doesn’t matter i have a paying customer for that just committed
i’m going to fix the problems afterwards no that’s not the way community works
so i always see ourselves and other companies in the space of
course yourself as well as the translators between business or
corporate speech and community speech there are just different levels of needs
and questions and answers and sometimes we just need mediators or translators to
get the communication going but i agree that i see more and more
corporate itd partners that want to get connected to open source communities
and also by hiring people of course which makes an awful lot of sense i mean you want to have some expertise
yourself you don’t want to have the deep level expertise for everything usually you cannot it’s just too much
and your business is i don’t know running accounts for your customers running insurances or whatever
your business is it’s not developing open source but you need people to understand the basic issues to fix
most of it and then if it goes down to a level where they cannot there are people like us to fix those
issues yeah that makes sense and there’s there’s definitely also a movement
towards being a good corporate citizen because like you said it for the reason of hiring
is these people want to hire the open source contributors which are in huge demand very hard to come by and
google’s in the facebooks they’re all trying to snatch them up but it’s really if you are interacting
with communities if you’re allowing your developers to contribute back to communities if you’re offering training programs then it’s likely that
those open source contributors will want to come and talk with you and work for you ultimately
so what do you what are some of the best practices for corporations wanting to work with open
source communities oh yeah that that is a tricky question
um i think there are different aspects to that um yes uh part of it is also financial helping
communities uh sponsoring communities for whatever they need uh sponsoring events
like most communities have their developer meetings and while it’s easy for me to fly to a
debian developer meeting because i have a company backing me up there are a lot of developers who don’t
have that especially when they’re still at uni university and need somebody to pay for it so there’s a
travel grant stuff like that and then it’s probably getting people
who get into those communities and just help it could be done by hiring people
sometimes it’s tricky i mean i’m i used to do some kernel work
it’s been a while actually it’s like 25 years ago but anyway i did some uh kernel work
and still to the day i sometimes get in and try whether i would want to do that work for
some company so yeah the linux kernel is a good example because
uh there are there’s more demand than experts and it’s difficult to get into
it um but the same holds for everything so if if you were like a big
corporate entity and you wanted to get into open source and be a good citizen there
you could certainly hire some of the major players in the community now if all those players already have a
job and they don’t want to switch you could also appoint some of your team to work with and inside the community it
takes longer but you have to give them time to go into it or to get into it
and the third approach obviously is the one we are making our business is not based on but it’s
also part of our business you can hire a company like us uh
to do that for you they’re already part of the community um and you can funnel
all what everything you want to do through that which we’ve seen quite a bit actually
yeah and that’s something which i think we believe is one of the best ways to go about it you
don’t have to spend all this money hiring internally you can go to a company that’s experts
in that field like creditive or quansite is one which the founder of open teams also
is the ceo of they focus on the pi data ecosystem and offering similar services to you around the pi data ecosystem
and they’re well acquainted with these communities and they’re already involved so it definitely does make it more
efficient and i think cost effective in the long run um and big companies are doing it these
days some of the clients are considerably successful companies and it’s great to see that they’re
becoming bigger advocates of open source and i think for a few decades now they have been but
they really really are caring about open source communities more and more by the day as we’re
getting towards the end do something a little bit fun and pretend we’re just jumping in a time machine and we’re skipping hard and we’re
clicking a button that says okay we’re jumping 10 years ahead of now where do you think open source is going
to be does it really have to be 10 years it’s kind of difficult to do that without outgoing into science faction
here so before we go like like like i don’t know three years or five years in the
future i’m pretty positive that open source will be
bigger quite significantly bigger than it is now um and i think that the part i mentioned
before about the cloud providers not selling open source but using it or even
from personal experience contracting with open source companies to help them sell some other open source tools and
some other services there there is no need anymore for
those add-ons there’s no need anymore to develop intellectual property because you’re selling that um and
and the need to develop ip has brought us to a point where some of those companies are just
redeveloping the wheel so you have somebody basing their software on open source x
and another company doing the same and the third company doing the same so they differentiate themselves by adding
i don’t know a backup tool let’s say a backup tool something more complex but let’s say a backup tool so
each one of them has a different backup tool but we only need one yeah and we already have one in open
source as well so they have developers that could improve the open source version develop a new one again and again and
again so i hope that we get a little bit away from that
approach and we get more into the pure open source world the world where people collaborate instead of compete
and that in my opinion will give open source a huge boost we will see more features because more
companies see advantages back when we started we were contracted to let’s say set up a
linux server because nobody could do that and it was fairly complicated i still remember the times when you
had to manually set mode lines in your x config to even access the monitor
so installing on servers that weren’t certified for linux was really complicated you had to find the right
drivers sometimes they didn’t even exist nowadays that’s completely out of the
completely out of the box i mean all the hardware vendors have that drivers in the linux code
mostly at least you just install it and it works so there has been development in open
source to take away that hurdle and then you get to the next one and the next one and we’re getting
further and further everything that coming commodity used to be complicated and the more we get commodity
the better open source becomes the more issues we have the more opportunities we have and the more
features we get there may be some software that is too niche or too complicated
uh or too expensive to manage to maintain uh to become fully open source maybe
could be but so far everything has moved there and i’m i’m pretty happy that i’m not in
the business of developing proprietary software because i’m not sure that is uh business with the future
yeah definitely and i think it’s open source is just going to continue and continue to grow i just wanted to jump back to um this
idea that you just mentioned that is the companies are forking and if i understood this correctly they’re
forking open source projects to develop their own a backup feature how do you think how
can companies collaborate yeah um the the thing is if they want to develop their own backup
feature because their unique selling point is the backup feature then there’s probably nothing to
do about it because they would lose their unique selling point but um i would prefer to see something well
probably kind of similar to what the linux kernel has where the hardware vendors work
together and have different different vendors have different developers in the
same group developing a feature together that everyone uses because they are not selling their
hardware because of that feature because other hardware has it too they just need it to run
and we see the same in the cloud space we see that the same in so many different
areas and i hope we see even more of it and we see less of this this is my castle
and i just shut down uh approach i would prefer to see much more
collaboration much more openness i get the point that people need to sell their software i
mean they have to make a living that’s fine by me and i’m fine with features that really bring another
benefit but the commodity pieces at least i hope people will work
together on we’ve seen that for example in the automotive space we see huge
car companies work together on the basis on the operating system for
the satna for the radio whatever you have in there nowadays because nobody buys a car
because this is running a better operating system than the other you want the ui feature yeah it makes a
difference whether you can set your sat nav easily or not that makes a difference but if the
underlying system is linux based or proprietary or different
linux based nobody cares so they combine forces there reduce cost and get to market quicker
which to me is exactly the move we want to see definitely it’s almost like the next phase of open source is
um enterprise is almost having that open source ethos themselves which i think is
exciting if that happens within the next 10 years it would be a great success
that would be awesome and i think open source will continue to thrive which is our mission here at open teams yeah same
for us i think we are completely agreed there yeah well thank you so much for your time today michael it’s been great
chatting with you thank you it’s been an absolute pleasure and i know you’re over in germany right
now what time is it well we have 10 to 9. so as you can see
around it’s dark it’s dark it is dark it’s dark it’s dark over there morning here so
thank you for listening uh if you like what you listen today then you can go to our youtube channel and
subscribe and please leave a comment and also leave a review on apple podcast letting
us know what you think that really does show a lot of support for the show so thanks very much everyone until next time
see you later see ya
[Music]
you
