They’re not going to buy the cow if they’re getting the milk for free — that old saw might be re-purposed to talk open-source versus proprietary IT. But in an interesting twist, one company has found that providing its technology in a free, open version and as a paid service package is actually proving to be an attractive selling point for it.

“All of the big vendors out there are building proprietary sets of technology,” said Jesse Proudman, distinguished engineer and CTO at IBM Blue Box. “At IBM, we really believe that the infrastructure and the actual code that underpins everything that we’re doing should be open.”

Proudman spoke tod John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit. He said this model builds a kind of trust with users so that they will feel more confident that paid services offered are actually worth it. “By making it open, customers have the ability to choose, ‘Do I want to work with IBM because I’m getting value from the service, or do I want to try to do things on my own?'” he explained.

A good boring

Proudman has an interesting way of measuring OpenStack’s progress: “OpenStack is super boring now,” he said. He explained that the kinks and difficulties of early years have been worked out so that it’s relatively smooth sailing now. “It’s a great boring. It works. There’s nothing to argue about anymore.”

He said that with the foundation stable, there is more time and energy to devote to up-the-stack advancement. “All the excitement and drama is up the stack in other portions,” he concluded.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE