Eren Niazi, Part II: the Untold Story

Petros Koutoupis — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 15:00:00 +0000

It was 2014, and everything seemed fine with Eren Niazi and the company he founded, Open Source Storage or OSS, although at the time, both the industry and the market were changing. Not only were open-source technologies used in every form and fashion to enable what has become the cloud, its users also were connecting in droves to take advantages of the many services it offered. We matured into an always connected society.

As markets evolved and consumer needs evolved, OSS needed to do something to continue to be relevant. Eren and his team came up with a solution to enable more involvement within the Open Source community by building a never-done-before social platform that closed the gap between file sharing and social networking. It also added a gamification component to help encourage participation on top of quality.

Note: gamification is the process of taking something that already exists, be it a website, enterprise application or online community, and integrating it with game mechanics to motivate participation, engagement and loyalty.

A patent was filed to capture this unique new platform: US15073028. Its status is now considered Abandoned (you'll learn why shortly). From the patent description:

Embodiments of the inventive concept provide a system and method for gamifying community driven open source software development projects, thereby spurring innovation and quality open source and freely available products. Embodiments of the inventive concept not only incentivizes the most desired tasks, such as coding, but also the less desirable actions like code review, documentation, quality assurance, testing, security analysis, and the like. In this manner, all steps along the software development path can be incentivized. Even scheduling and meeting deadlines for enhancements, bug fixes, and security auditing can benefit from an award system. Embodiments include a development gamification system including a user interface logic section to provide a development gamification interface to incentivize a community of users to develop open source software projects.

Figure 1. A General Illustrated Overview of US15073028

But in order to build this promising new platform, OSS needed outside investment to fund it. Eren approached numerous investors, all of which decided to participate. With this new funding, Open Source Storage decided to move its operations to a new location in Campbell, California.

Figure 2. Open Source Storage Headquarters (2014–2016)

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Pioneers in Open Source--Eren Niazi, Part I: the Start of a Movement and the Open-Source Revolution Redefining the Data Center

Petros Koutoupis — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 13:06:40 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

The name may not be a familiar one to everyone, but Eren Niazi can be credited with laying the foundation and paving the way to the many software-defined and cloud-centric technologies in use today.

When considering the modern data center, it's difficult to imagine a time when open-source technologies were considered taboo or not production-grade, but that time actually existed. There was a time when the data center meant closed and propriety technologies, developed and distributed by some of the biggest names in the industry—the days when EMC, NetApp, Hewlett Packard (HP), Oracle or even Sun Microsystems owned your data center and the few applications upon which you heavily relied. It also was a time when your choice was limited to one vendor, and you would invest big into that single vendor. If you were an HP shop, you bought HP. If you were an EMC shop, you bought EMC—and so on. From the customer's point of view, needing to interact with only a single vendor for purchasing, management and support was comforting.

However, shifting focus back to the present, the landscape is quite different. Instead, you'll find an environment of mixed offerings provided by an assortment of vendors, both large and small. Proprietary machines work side by side with off the shelf commodity devices hosting software-defined software, most of which are built on top of open-source code. And half the applications are hosted in virtual machines over a Hypervisor or just spun up in one or more containers.

These changes didn't happen overnight. It took visionaries like Eren Niazi to identify the full potential of open-source software technologies. He saw what others did not and, in turn, proved to an entire industry that open source was not merely production-ready, but he also used that same technology to redefine the entire data center.

His story is complicated, filled with ups and downs. Eren faced his fair share of trials and tribulations that gave him everything, just to have it all taken away. But, let's begin at the beginning.

Born in Sunnyvale, California, a little more than 40 years ago, Eren grew up down the street from Steve Jobs, and on many occasions, he engaged the legendary Apple co-founder in inspiring conversations. The two shared many characteristics. Neither ever finished college. Both are entrepreneurs and inventors. Niazi and Jobs each were driven from their own companies, only to return again. Around age 12, Eren became fascinated with computers and learned how to develop code. However, his adventures in open-source technologies didn't truly start until the year 1998.

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