Why Cloud‑Native Is a Successful Open‑Source Model – Insights from Chen Kai

Chen Kai, former leader of Windows kernel development and Microsoft Azure Fabric Controller, co‑founded the early Chinese enterprise‑grade open‑source container company Lingque Cloud in 2014, prompting many to wonder why a top‑tier engineer would join an "eating‑soil" startup.

He emphasizes that open source is a software development and distribution model focused on improving how software is built, rather than the idealistic freedom of early free‑software movements, and that this focus has led to broader adoption, faster iteration, and higher quality compared to closed‑source alternatives.

The article outlines three main open‑source business models—service, Open Core, and SaaS—highlighting their strengths and challenges, and explains how commercial incentives shape the success or failure of open‑source projects.

It also discusses the conflicts arising from commercial interests, such as cloud providers repackaging open‑source projects into managed services, and the resulting “knife‑edge” disputes that can threaten the ecosystem, prompting projects to add anti‑competitive clauses or create new licensing models.

Cloud‑native is presented as a successful open‑source paradigm because Kubernetes and containers provide portability across clouds, act as a new cloud operating system, and expose a declarative API that can orchestrate both workloads and infrastructure, fostering a neutral, community‑driven ecosystem.

Chen Kai identifies three keys to cloud‑native’s healthy growth: the technology itself (Kubernetes’s portability and extensibility), a multi‑vendor, loosely‑coupled open‑core business model, and strong community governance through organizations like the CNCF.

Lingque Cloud’s contributions, such as the open‑source Kube‑OVN networking solution donated to CNCF, exemplify how companies can invest in and give back to the cloud‑native community, reinforcing the model’s sustainability.