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Dirk Hohndel’s message across interviews and essays from 2017–2020 is practical: open source is not merely code that companies download. It is a network of people, trust, governance and shared maintenance. Businesses get dependable results when they understand the projects in their products, work with those communities and add the engineering needed for support, security, compliance and scale.
What Hohndel was arguing
The supplied title refers to a body of Hohndel interviews and commentary rather than one verified page with that exact headline. The relevant material includes a VMware summary of a TFiR conversation published in January 2020, VMware’s highlights from a 2018 theCUBE interview at KubeCon EU, a 2017 essay by Hohndel, and a Data Center Knowledge interview published around VMworld in November 2020.
Those sources present a consistent distinction. A community project decides its own scope, features and release direction. A company’s product is assembled to meet customer requirements, fit a broader architecture and carry commercial obligations. Hohndel put it this way in VMware’s 2020 summary: “The projects fundamentally live for themselves. They are their own purpose. Their communities define their scope, their features and releases. They live outside…independent of a company. Versus the product, which is something the company creates based on customer requirements, their own architecture, and the family of products that they want to create to solve customer problems.”
Open source is a social system, not just a method
In VMware’s 2018 interview highlights, Hohndel said, “People think of [open source] as a software development methodology—and it is—but fundamentally it’s a social phenomenon.” His 2017 essay makes the same point more directly: “At the core, open source is all about people and relationships.”
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That framing changes how an enterprise should evaluate a dependency. Technical quality still matters, but so do the maintainers’ capacity, the project’s decision-making process, communication norms and the company’s own reputation as a participant. A patch that solves an internal problem but is never explained, tested or submitted upstream may leave the firm carrying a permanent private fork.
Project versus product: the boundary enterprises must keep clear
| Question | Community project | Commercial product |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets direction? | The project’s community and maintainers | The company, guided by customer requirements and product strategy |
| Primary purpose | Its own technical mission and community goals | A supported solution within a family of products |
| Typical obligations | Review, release and governance work defined by the project | Support, integration, compatibility, compliance and lifecycle commitments |
| Relationship to the other | Independent of any single vendor | May package, extend or contribute to one or more projects |
Hohndel’s distinction does not imply that commercial products are illegitimate or that projects should avoid companies. It prevents a category error: buying a supported product does not mean the upstream community has adopted the vendor’s roadmap, and using a project does not automatically provide the support or assurances customers expect from a product.
His advice to companies going “all-in” on open source
Map dependencies and ownership
Inventory where open-source components run, which versions are deployed, who maintains internal changes and what licenses govern redistribution. Include transitive dependencies rather than stopping at the libraries named in an application’s manifest.
Engage before a crisis
Hohndel’s 2018 advice is explicit: “You can’t just consume open source components; you need to engage with them, you need to understand how their work affects your work.” Engagement can mean joining design discussions, answering user questions, reviewing patches, attending community meetings or assigning an engineer who can work in the project’s public channels.
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Send useful improvements upstream
When a company fixes a defect, improves portability or adds a feature that is broadly useful, contributing it upstream can reduce the cost of maintaining a private fork. The contribution still needs documentation, tests and alignment with the project’s standards; an internal patch is not automatically an acceptable upstream change.
Make community health part of risk management
Assess maintainer activity, release practice, vulnerability response and governance alongside performance and functionality. A project with no clear path for review or succession may create operational risk even when its current code works well.
How commercial work can add value around a project
In the 2020 account, Hohndel described legitimate areas for commercial engineering around open source: operating at larger scale, meeting compliance requirements, maintaining compatibility, integrating several components and providing customer support. Those services can fund engineering that also improves the shared project.
The boundary remains important. A vendor may offer tested builds, documentation, service-level commitments and a controlled upgrade path while the independent project continues to set its own release schedule. Customers should ask which fixes are submitted upstream, how long private patches are maintained and what happens if the vendor drops a component.
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“What’s next” in Hohndel’s 2017–2020 view
His forward-looking concerns were about incentives and engineering practice, not a forecast that can be treated as a current 2026 market finding.
Web-delivered software and control
Hohndel questioned how software delivered through web services changes users’ ability to inspect, modify or preserve the software they depend on. The issue is less about a particular deployment model than about who controls execution, data and the terms of access.
Licensing and hyperscaler economics
He also discussed the tension between projects released under open licenses and large service providers that can build businesses around those projects without carrying the same direct costs as the original maintainers. Licensing changes and new business models are responses to that tension, but they involve trade-offs for contributors, users and downstream vendors.
Security and compliance attention
Another concern was that assembling many components can outpace an organization’s understanding of how the resulting system behaves. Security review, dependency tracking and compliance work therefore need to be treated as engineering responsibilities, not paperwork added after deployment.
Quick Recap
A practical decision framework for an enterprise
- Classify the dependency. Record whether it is runtime code, a build tool, a service, a kernel component or an optional feature.
- Identify the project and the product layer. Note the upstream release, any vendor distribution and every local modification.
- Choose a support model. Decide whether your team will self-support, buy a supported distribution or combine both approaches.
- Set contribution rules. Define when engineers are expected to report issues, submit patches and participate in reviews.
- Plan for change. Track end-of-life dates, license obligations, security advisories and the work required to rebase local patches.
- Measure the relationship. Review response times, accepted contributions, unresolved private patches and the project’s governance health at regular intervals.
What readers should—and should not—take from the interviews
- Open source participation includes relationships, governance and maintenance, not only downloading code.
- An upstream project and a vendor’s product can cooperate without being the same thing.
- Support, integration, scale and compliance are real engineering work that may sit around a community project.
- Hohndel’s statements about web software, licensing and hyperscaler incentives were opinions recorded in interviews from 2017–2020; they should not be presented as newly verified market statistics.
- VMware’s archive identifies Hohndel historically as a former Chief Open Source Officer. These sources do not establish his current job.
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