Businesses of all sizes are sorting through the maze of cloud and software options available in the market today. Single cloud or multicloud? Proprietary software or open source?

Those and other prime topics in enterprise computing got the full treatment recently in a special panel discussion on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio in Palo Alto, California.

On the panel were Jim Long (pictured, second from left), chief executive officer of Didja Inc.; Sarbjeet Johal (second from right), cloud consultant and principal adviser at Batchery, a Berkeley-based global incubator for seed stage entrepreneurs; and Joseph Jacks (right), founder and general partner of OSS Capital LP. They spoke with theCUBE host John Furrier (left). Answers were condensed for clarity.

Is there room for more clouds? Are we going to see specialty clouds?

Long: I sure hope so. The internet has unfortunately become sort of the internet of monopolies, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.

Jacks: I think we need a new kind of open collaborative cloud, and we haven’t really seen any of the large critical mass cloud providers participate in that type of model. As the open-source community and the open-source ecosystem continues to grow and explode, we’ll need a third sort of provider, one that isn’t based on monopoly or based on a traditional proprietary software business, like Microsoft kind of transitioning their enterprise customers to services.

Johal: There’s room for newer cloud players, provided that we can detach the platforms from the environments they are sitting on. The proprietariness has to be lowered. It can be through open source.

What’s your take on the cloud market for enterprise?

Johal: For the enterprise, they actually don’t need all the bells and whistles, which Amazon has. They need just core things like compute, network and storage, and some other sort of services, maybe database, maybe data share.

How about startup companies that are built in the cloud and scaling out on platforms like Amazon?

Long: For a startup, it’s really about moving fast with your own solution that solves a problem. You don’t necessarily care too much that you’re tied into Amazon completely because you know that if you need to, you can make a change some day.

We’re actually creating a hybrid cloud, if you will, a purpose-built cloud to support local television stations, and we do think that’s going to be, along with using Amazon, a unique cloud with our own APIs.

There’s real value being created in open source. What opportunities do you see for entrepreneurs looking to scale their business?

Jacks: Whether you’re building a cloud service or a proprietary software product, your value creation exponent is typically bounded by two things. Capital and fundraising into the entity creating the software, and the centralization of research and development, meaning engineering output for producing the software.

With commercial open-source software, the exact opposite is true. Value creation is decoupled and independent from funding, and value creation is also decentralized in terms of research and development. You have a decentralized, community-based, crowdsourced phenomena of contributing to a code base that isn’t necessarily owned or fully controlled by a single entity.

Johal: Open source is pretty sort of lame at the very core of the things. OpenStack failed for that reason. But it’s pretty good in the middle, building pipes, building some platforms. Hopefully, it will go deeper into the core, which we want to see.

Kubernetes is becoming a force for solidarity in the community of cloud-native, as well as an actual interoperable orchestration layer for multiple clouds. What’s next?

Jacks: We think the future of technology and the future of software is really that open source is at the core, as opposed to the periphery or the edges. We think the future will gradually shift from closed proprietary cores to open cores. An open core is where you have a core open-source software project as the fundamental building block for the company.

Hadoop caused the creation of MapR and Cloudera and Hortonworks, Spark caused the creation of Databricks, Kafka caused the creation of Confluent; Git caused the creation of GitHub and GitLab.

Long: That’s a really interesting model, having open source be the center of the universe, then figure out how to have some proprietary stuff around it that other people can take advantage of. That makes a lot of sense and could certainly fit in the TV industry from where I sit.

What’s something new that you’ve learned?

Long: Something as simple as TV, you might take for granted, but lower-income people don’t necessarily have a TV that works or a hotel room that has a TV that works or, heaven forbid, they’re homeless. It’s really gratifying to me to see people sort of tuning back into their local media through television, just by offering it on their phone and laptops.

Johal: What I have gravitated towards in last three to six months is the blockchain. What can it do for us, is there really a thing behind it, and can we leverage it?

Jacks: There’s such a huge lack of consensus and agreement in the industry. It’s a fascinatingly polarizing area, the general topic of open-source technology, economics, value creation, value capture.

Here’s the complete discussion, one of many theCUBE’s many CUBE Conversations:

Photo: SiliconANGLE