I'm not affiliated with them, but I recall this being marketed at some point as giving you the flexibility and customization powers that the Googles and Facebooks of the world have with their on-prem infrastructure without needing to have as deep of a dedicated staff as they do to just this which allowed them to develop all their custom tooling in the first place.
Basically if you are on-prem, and you are dissatisfied with what you are getting out of today's onprem sellers. Things like bad firmware with slow update cycles, issues with rack/power supplies/cabling/interconnecting systems. Closed down systems that don't allow much customization, etc. They are open sourcing a lot of their work along the way
Again, I'm not affiliated with them, and my info may be outdated so take it with a grain of salt. But that's how I've seen them for some time.
I would say Oxide is inflexible and non-customizable since they have exactly one hardware configuration and few software features at this point. Their claim is more that their rack works and everything else on the market is full of bugs.
I'm not an infra engineer, but this claim "everything else on the market is full of bugs" might be the killer app. Of course, it needs to be true. What if they iterate to an insanely stable embedded code base (BIOS, etc.)? Then, continuously upgrade the hardware to use the latest CPU/RAM/NVME. I could see that being very valuable.
I fully expect there will be data-loss bugs and poor performance during recovery in their in-house distributed block storage solution. That's just in the nature of the problem domain, and this is all new code:
Basically if you are on-prem, and you are dissatisfied with what you are getting out of today's onprem sellers. Things like bad firmware with slow update cycles, issues with rack/power supplies/cabling/interconnecting systems. Closed down systems that don't allow much customization, etc. They are open sourcing a lot of their work along the way
Again, I'm not affiliated with them, and my info may be outdated so take it with a grain of salt. But that's how I've seen them for some time.