IT Ops Query

How is open source sustainability similar to the subprime mortgage crisis? And what can an episode of South Park teach us about open product business models? Dan Lorenc has a uniquely multifaceted view of these and other questions – he worked at Google from 2012 to 2021, began contributing to open source projects in the Kubernetes community in 2016, and along the way, developed the tooling that wo...

Tobie Langel is Principal and Managing Partner at UnlockOpen, a consulting firm in Geneva that advises clients on working with the open tech ecosystem. Langel is a passionate advocate for open source, and in February, he gave a presentation at the­ State of Open Conference in London urging funding for open source maintainers. Here, he discusses the distinction between open source development and o...

Bruce Perens created the definition of open source and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He has said in recent public interviews, however, that open source has failed, and called for its overhaul under his Post-Open project. In this episode, Beth caught up with him to hear more about his ideas for the world after open source.

Adam Jacob is CEO and co-founder of System Initiative, an infrastructure automation software startup that came out of stealth in 2023. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Chef Software, which also focused on infrastructure automation, and was sold to Progress Software in 2020. Chef had roots in open source, and underwent a license change in 2019; Jacob has taken a different tack with his new...

Alexis Richardson co-founded a company in 2014 called Weaveworks, which created an open source GitOps project called Flux CD. In February, the company ceased operations, despite having gained new customers in 2023. Among the events that precipitated the closure of the business were acquisition talks with a larger company that fell through "at the 11th hour," according to a post by Richardson on Li...

William Morgan is CEO at Buoyant, a company that sells commercial and SaaS support for the Linkerd service mesh project and employs all of its maintainers. In February, Buoyant announced it would no longer be making a certain class of the project's code, called stable release artifacts, available for free to production users with more than 50 employees. Morgan discusses community reaction to that...

Chad Whitacre is head of open source at Sentry, an application and performance monitoring software maker that moved to a business source license for its products in 2019, and then to a functional source license in November 2023. Most recently, Chad has been working on a new project called Software Commons over the last six months, with the goal of balancing the user freedom prioritized by open sou...

I'm Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, and this is IT Ops Query, a new podcast that distills the signal from the noise about enterprise digital transformation and IT operations. In this first season, I'm talking to guests about the ongoing friction between open source software principles and sustainability. Join me March 28 for a series of weekly episodes featuring the IT experts, en...