Scarf today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 conference revealed it has integrated its platform for tracking consumption of open source software with the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform, at a time when the debate over what open source constitutes remains heated.
The platform has also been updated to add an ability to directly correct and flag event data for improved accuracy in company matching and attribution and enhanced data filtering options for exporting data.
The Scarf platform is primarily used by IT vendors to identify organizations that are consuming open-source software at a level of scale that might warrant additional support. Alternatively, some vendors may have developed commercial add-ons to an open-source tool or platform that they are trying to encourage organizations to license.
The Scarf platform ties usage data and attributes such as internet addresses to specific organizations that have downloaded a significant amount of software from an open-source software repository. In total, the Scarf gateway has tracked more than seven billion events.
Scarf CEO Avi Press said the company works in partnership with consortiums such as The Linux Foundation to help ensure the open-source software ecosystem remains economically viable. In the absence of those insights there would not be as many IT vendors sponsoring open source software projects, he noted.
There is, of course, a lot of contention within the open-source community that often results in forks being created, because an IT vendor that originally created one project or another has decided to change its licensing terms. Usually, that change is attributed to cloud service providers that wind up benefiting more financially from the open-source software than the vendor that created it.
When those changes are made to licensing terms, however, it’s usually not too long before disaffected members of a community, sometimes with the help of a cloud service provider, create a fork of that original project that is made available under the same licensing terms as the previous project.
That level of friction, however, could be avoided if it was simpler for IT vendors that sponsor open-source projects to find opportunities to add additional commercial value in a more targeted way, said Press. In fact, many of those organizations are more likely to respond positively to such inquiries than a generic cold call from a salesperson, he added. Those types of customer engagements ensure the open-source software ecosystem remains healthy, said Press.
There are, of course, strident open-source software advocates who are generally suspicious of any project sponsored by IT vendors. However, many of the contributions to those projects are made by software engineers who work for IT vendors.
Arguments over open-source licensing models have been occurring for decades. Most recently, the community has been arguing over what constitutes an open-source AI model, many of which don’t make available how the weights were applied to train the underlying large language model (LLM). It’s not likely any of these issues will be resolved any time soon, however, ultimately each organization will need to decide for itself what definition of open source it wants to embrace and support.
