Last week Midokura decided to follow Juniper’s lead and make MidoNet an open-source product (after all, a similar move worked really well for Contrail, right?).

I may be too skeptical (again), but I fail to see how this could possibly work.

So far I’ve seen three types of OpenStack users:

• DIY crowd who will take whatever open-source products that fit their needs, spend however long it takes to make them work together, and never invest a penny in support and services. The really big players (like Amazon, Google or Facebook) are always taking this path, and some large organizations think they can emulate them;
• Believers in magical cost reduction, who will spend months or years building an open-source OpenStack environment, only to wake up to the real costs of fully supported versions of all products they used to build OpenStack (because their management wouldn’t allow them to run non-supported products in production). VMware just might be cheaper and faster to deploy.
• Realists who think OpenStack is the way to go, and save time by buying a supposedly-fully-baked and supported distribution from whatever vendor they prefer. Juniper might get some enterprise support fees from these users (at least where they already work with them); I doubt that too many major vendors will include Midonet in their OpenStack distribution.

Have I missed anyone? Are there OpenStack users out there willing to build their own environment from scratch and then pay for support? Document your experiences in the comments!

Finally, Midokura might count on their product getting some mindshare in the DIY crowd thus making the product interesting enough to make Midokura an acquisition target. That will be a tough sell – SDN is bound to start sliding down the slope toward the trough of disillusionment any time now.