“Open doesn’t mean free. Open means optionality,” said Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara, in this interview with TFiR. It’s a simple but powerful message—especially at a time when companies are navigating increasing complexity, rising infrastructure costs, and an explosion of AI workloads. In this conversation, O’Meara lays out a strong case for why companies—regardless of size—should double down on open source. He highlights three key benefits:

Optionality and Customer Choice

O’Meara emphasized that open source lets vendors compete on “capability and quality,” not on locked-in feature sets. “You’re selling on the value of what you do, not on hiding what you don’t,” he said. This transparency builds trust and enables long-term partnerships between vendors and users.

For startups especially, open source provides a kind of technical and strategic durability. Even if the company’s commercial arm changes, customers still retain the ability to use, contribute to, or extend the project. “Just because it’s open doesn’t mean customers won’t pay for support or services,” O’Meara said. In fact, it often creates a stronger ecosystem around shared goals.

“One of the big drivers of open source is that every problem has been solved in a dozen different ways,” he explained. “Why reinvent the wheel?”

This philosophy is embodied in Mirantis’ recent work with Nebul, a sovereign AI GPU cloud provider in the Netherlands. Nebul has deployed Mirantis k0rdent to orchestrate both Kubernetes clusters and OpenStack virtualization for multi-tenant AI environments.

“We’ve overlaid k0rdent on top of their environment, orchestrating existing infrastructure while adding declarative, on-the-fly capabilities,” said O’Meara. The result? Rapid workload deployment using just a few lines of config—delivering tangible speed and value.

The partnership with Nebul underscores the strength of open collaboration. “They’ve been super collaborative,” he added. “Strong technical teams who understand where the future is going and contribute directly to the code.”

In an era where cloud sovereignty, AI infrastructure, and developer agility intersect, Mirantis is positioning k0rdent as a critical layer for enabling secure, scalable, and open environments.

For tech leaders evaluating their infrastructure strategy, the lesson is clear: open source isn’t just a tech decision—it’s a business imperative.