Revenera Makes Monetizing Container Images Easier
Revenera, a division of Flexera, this week announced the general availability of a platform that makes it easier for developers to monetize container software.
Nicole Segerer, vice president of products and marketing for Revenera, says the Software Container Delivery service manages entitlements to container images that typically are stored in a repository or registry.
Developers currently employ the Revenera platform to monetize millions of entitlements and downloads of software. The Software Container Delivery service now extends that capability to container images to enable developers to maximize revenue opportunities, she says.
In addition to providing an audit trail of any revenue generated by those container images, the Software Container Delivery contributes to providing a better onboarding experience for the end customer, Segerer says, noting many development teams today rely on a custom platform to monetize data that is often cumbersome for end customers to employ.
While there is a lot of enthusiasm for open source software, there are many developers who would prefer to get paid for their effort. Containers make it a lot easier for individual developers or even enterprise IT organizations to package code in a way that makes it easier to reuse. However, many developers don’t pursue that opportunity because they lack the means to effectively monetize their development efforts. In some cases, those efforts might only yield enough revenue to fund what amounts to a hobby. In other cases, however, it could end up generating a significant amount of recurring revenue, which could spur more developers to quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs.
Developers, like everyone else, have bills to pay. Contributing to open source projects to gain the admiration of peers provides only so much motivation. Demand for developers with container expertise is high, but not every developer is looking for full-time employment. Making it easier to monetize their efforts might go a long way to increasing the total size of the container development community.
Encouraging more developers to acquire container expertise is crucial in ensuring the overall ecosystem continues to grow and evolve. It’s estimated there are roughly 4 million developers who have container expertise, out of an enterprise developer community of as many as 20 million who write code using any number of frameworks.
There’s obviously a lot of time and effort being poured into increasing the size of the container developer community, including such things as providing free training. As much as developers may welcome these efforts, the vendors that provide that training would do well to remember that compensation still drives most behaviors—it’s not enough to provide tools and training to developers without at least outlining a path that makes the time and effort required to master containers worthwhile.
After all, most developers are perfectly content using the tools and frameworks they already know to build applications. The challenge is explaining why they should switch to something else in a way that clearly demonstrates how they benefit as well as the end customer.
