Google Cloud's new CEO used his first public talk to throw shade at Amazon over its feud with open source startups (GOOGL)

thomas kurian, oracle, sv100 2015

At his inaugural appearance as Google Cloud's new CEO on Tuesday, Thomas Kurian said that unlike its competitors, Google Cloud partners with open source startups to run their software on its cloud.
Google Cloud's largest competitor, Amazon Web Services, is known for taking the open source software created by smaller companies and selling it on its cloud.
Startups like Redis Labs and Confluent both changed their licensing after AWS started selling their software.

Amazon has a habit of taking free software created by other companies and selling it on its cloud. But Google Cloud isn't like that, new CEO Thomas Kurian says.

At his inaugural appearance as the new CEO of Google Cloud on Tuesday, Kurian spoke about how Google Cloud allows customers to use a variety of open source tools to build applications on its cloud.

Many of these tools are developed by other startups and made available as open source, meaning that they are free for anyone to use, download, modify — and even sell, something that Amazon Web Services frequently does.

Kurian, a former Oracle executive who replaced Diane Greene as CEO, said that Google Cloud takes a "different approach" from its competitors when it comes to open source.

"If you look at the open source community, we’re taking the approach of partnering with the open source community, as opposed to taking their technology and selling it on our platform," Kurian said onstage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.

AWS, Google Cloud's biggest competitor, is known for repackaging and selling other startups' open source software on its cloud — and igniting resentment from these startups. Some companies, like Redis Labs and Confluent, even fought back by with the controversial move of changing their licensing.

Amazon, and particular AWS, has a reputation for not contributing as much to open source as would be appropriate from a company this size, furthering these tensions. That said, AWS has started introducing major open source projects of its own, which have been well-recieved by the community, in a move that could defrost that relationship.

Microsoft and Google both have more employees contributing to more open source projects on GitHub. Kubernetes, one of the most popular open source projects, was started by engineers at Google.

Currently, Google Cloud supports popular third-party databases such as Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, and Microsoft SQL Server.

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