Episode 137 - GluuFederation/identerati-office-hours GitHub Wiki
Title: iOPA: Styra Gets a Genius Bar Makeover
- Host: Mike Schwartz, Founder/CEO Gluu
- Guest: Or Weis, Co-Founder / CEO at Permit.io
Channels
Description
Mike Schwartz and Or Weis (Co-Founder / CEO, Permit.io) debate Apple’s acquisition of Styra, the commercial backer of Open Policy Agent (OPA). With Styra’s enterprise offerings winding down and its engineers moving to Apple, Or flagged growing customer anxiety and pointed to Permit.io as a support lifeline, while also tying the move to the decline of the open-core business model. Mike, meanwhile, speculated that Apple’s involvement could both stabilize OPA financially, at the price of transparency. Mike raised the bigger unknown of what Apple really plans to do with policy-as-code technology—and what that might mean for Cedar and the wider ecosystem.
Homework
- Open Policy Agent: Past, Present, and Future — CNCF Blog
- Apple and the Ghosts of Companies Past — Stratechery (2025)
- Cedar vs. OPA: Two Paths for Policy-as-Code — AWS Open Source Blog
Open Source Rabbit Hole
- The Future of Open Source, or Why Open Core Is Dead — The New Stack (2022)
- RIP Open Core — Long Live Open Source The New Stack (2024)
- Typical Mistakes in Open Source Monetization — Peter Zaitsev
- Open Source Underdogs Podcast — Mike Schwartz - 70 episodes of first person interviews with founders, CEOs and other leaders. Particularly relevant is Solomon Hykes interview as he describes how Docker lost control of their trademark and was finally rescued by an obscure (but licenced) component.
- Business of Open Source Podcast — Emily Omier 250+ episodes with founders--very comprehensive.
Takeaways
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⚡ Or thinks the simplest reason Apple buys Styra is because Apple uses it internally for their cloud infrastructure. The good news is that some of the commercial stuff Styra was holding back is going to get open sourced.
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⚡ OPA could run on an iPhone (it's written in Go), but the tool chain is not ideal. 🤖 iGovernor is still on the table! 🤖
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⚡ From an open source business standpoint, OPA has great adoption (10M downloads) but the enteprise offering less so. And unfortunately the Strya trademark is less well known then the OPA trademark. Its reminisent of Docker, who initially failed to release a compelling enterprise control plane (listen to Mike's podcast with Solomon Hykes: https://gluu.co/hykes)
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⚡ The bad news is uncertainty. In 2018, there were some hiccups when Apple open sourced FoundationDB. Probably the best thing to do is to track who reviews OPA PRs and cuts releases after the hiring shuffle. Hopefully, Apple’s involvement translates into more releases and better engineering hygiene—as eventually happened with FoundationDB.