| # rant I thought about this for a solid 15 minutes. What really is an open source of version of Cloudflare? That leads into the question of what is really Cloudflare. An enterprise that has built something so huge that the idea it represents can not be separated from the service (as a whole) they provide. That is like saying what is the open source alternative to I don't know....Intel or Oracle. It not only covers a suite of offering that is impossible to replicate, but rather the complexity of each component of their entire service suite. How the heck are you supposed to do open source CDN? Then you take a step back and the question again, which still doesn't make any sense. "Open source alternative to Cloudflare". The question is supposed to be "What represents the open source alternative to what Cloudflare's XYZ does". CDN, a network that is designed to deliver content... and needs to be open source. P2P systems? Torrenting? Some weird blockchain stuff? Are they CDN? I have no clue. You end up compromising in the definition of the service Cloudflare provides to pick something because it is supposed to be Open Source. You go down the list of each service Cloudflare with your own Open Source twist and you end up with a web service that more and more represents the Web 1.0 and arguably not reliable. What are you compromising at that point? Open source becomes an agenda rather than a solution. Cloudflare isn't a software company, you are essentially paying them for the hardware they are carrying in their network/portfolio. They are not Open Source-able. |
Then we have their chip architecture, I think RISC-V at least gives us an open ISA but I am not aware of fully open implementations. Then there is the various software Intel provides, everything from drivers to MKL. There are some open source versions of them here and there.
So can we have an open source Intel? Yes, but not in this world. Mostly because they do physical things. And I think that loops us back to CDNs because thats the point with them too.
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