Adobe acquired Magento for $1.67 billion, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion — open source turns out to be a good business too. This article is mainly a record of, and some thoughts about, open source. 1. What Open Source Is 1.1 History In 1969, Bell Labs shared the Unix source code with the community, laying an important foundation for open source.

1. Understanding ToB It is only because money has become harder and harder to make from ToC that ToB has flourished. The era in which a single idea could be turned into a good product and ultimately accepted by everyone has been crushed beneath the wheels. In the early days of the internet, a single portal directory made Sohu, a single chat tool made Tencent, and even hao123 — nothing more than a handful of jump pages — sold for tens of millions.

The team I am on is responsible for SaaS development. We have a few flagship SaaS products and also some supporting ones. The flagship SaaS products have complex architectures, large technical challenges, and heavy staffing, and they are the focus of our KPIs. But a flagship project cannot stay the flagship forever — projects have life cycles and phases.

1. IT Infrastructure Is Undergoing Drastic Change Traditional enterprises are building more efficient business models on top of internet technology to strengthen their competitiveness in their industries. Lower R&D costs, faster product iteration, closer proximity to customers, better service quality… This whole set of changes will push the productivity and living standards of society as a whole onto a new level.

1. On Running When you talk about running, it is easy to think of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The sentence pattern “What I talk about when I talk about XX” has been widely quoted, which says something about the influence of the book.