It's stupid that it was closed source in the first place. The valuable stuff is on the server side. This is not really anything exciting, if they open sourced their servers, that would be very interesting.
Sounds to me like they are now open to the idea, that way more people use some standard that they can have input on, and then they can capture the customers that don't want to try and reinvent the wheel.
This looks great to me, often I work on projects with closed systems, they aren't allowed to ship the telemetry outside their own network, so none of the SaaS solutions will work. However I work on other projects that I can use SaaS, but I'm not going to do the work to have two solutions depending on the environment.
I think this is probably less relevant today - after a certain size the "moat" for an observability company starts to be their existing customer base. If NR works with everything and everything works with NR it's much harder to make a case that you should continue adding alternatives to your observability stack.
- opinions expressed here are exactly those of a misguided employee with too much time on his hands and not those of said employee's corporate overlord, if you take any of my nonsensical rambling as investment advice you do so at your own peril. I regularly gamble all of my rupees away on coinflip games in Zelda.
While I do not condone the use of the s-word here I understand the sentiment and I am also glad to see that they've open sourced them, however belated the decision.
With regard to opening the servers I've actually just now submitted a request to give all of hacker news direct access to the infrastructure via SSH. I'll let you know what they say.
- I work at NR, my words are terrible and unfit for any purpose but especially investment advice. If you read them and make bad decisions this paragraph is designed to prevent me from going to Martha-Stewart-jail. I hear they have tennis but I quite like choosing my own clothing.
