The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I chatted with Stephen Goldberg , co-founder of Harper , about the process of taking Harper from a closed-source software company to a open source company. I already talked to Ethan Arrowood about the transition to open source, but Stephen was able to give a founders perspective about why Harper wanted to move to open source, why it wasn’t launched as an o...

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Sam Alba , co-founder of Mendral , formerly of Dagger, and the first hire at Docker. We talked a lot about about how AI is changing the developer tools marketplace. If AI is changing the way software is developed, what does that mean for the companies that previously had made tools for developers?  We talked a lot about hype; what is hype and what...

One of the myths that swirl around the open source company ecosystem is that all open source companies started as an open source project that then suddenly got traction, and followed by the founders frantically throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure out a business model.  In fact, this is not the story of how all open source companies came to exist.  It is not at all uncommon for a compan...

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Yann Lechelle , Executive President of :Probabl . Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation was about whether or not there is a risk from generative AI being trained on open source code, then generating new open source code and then re-training itself on that code. Yann says that there is already enough code in the world to...

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Manik Surtani , one of the co-founders of the Agentic AI Foundation and the CTO at the foundation. This is part of the series I’m working on about open source and AI, which started last week with a conversation with Glauber Costa about how AI killed a bug bounty program.  Manik talks about how the foundation came into existence, why it’s...

The Business of Open Source is back! I’m starting a series about AI and open source this week.  I reached out to Glauber Costa , founder of Turso , after reading a post of his on LinkedIn about how bot-written PRs for their bug bounty program forced them to discontinue the program completely. In this episode, he talked about the bug bounty program — how it started, who contributed to it initially,...

There’s a new episode of The Business of Open Source today! It’s been a while.  I talked with Anais Concepcion about a program she’s been testing at Grist to give free activation codes for the enterprise version of Grist to individuals and small businesses that have a revenue under $1 million. The program has been in place for 5 months, and Anais came on the show to talk about both the strategy be...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tom Hacohen , CEO and founder at Svix. We kicked off the conversation by talking about why Svix is an open core company… but Tom still initially didn’t think he’d be a good guest for the podcast. Unlike a lot of open source companies, Svix doesn’t make open source a huge part of its identity. Yes, there are business reasons for being an open s...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Quentin Sinig , who has been the first “business” hire at three open source companies; Strapi, Kestra and now Pruna.ai. We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, which was especially interesting because it spanned three open source companies so we were able to talk about patterns Quentin saw at all of them, as well as how the ecosystem...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke to Or Weis , the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io. Or is a serial entrepreneur who has had a long career in developer tools. We talked about Permit’s relationship with open source, including of course the open source projects that they create and maintain.  One thing to note is that none of Permit’s open source projects are branded as “Permit.” They...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Rob Taylor , CTO/CSO and founder of ChipFlow. Although ChipFlow is unambiguously a software company, it creates software that facilitate the creation of semiconductors, so it straddles the software and hardware worlds. Some of the things we talked about include:  The state of open source in the semiconductor space, and why that matters. A larg...

This week I’m back from vacation and I have a new episode of The Business of Open Source, with Taco Potze !  Taco is the co-founder and CEO of Open Social.  A couple interesting takeaways from our conversation:  When you’re transitioning from a services company to a product company, it’s much easier if the product you work on is connected to the services your clients are already paying for.  Landi...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz , CEO and co-founder of Penpot. We started out by talking about the transition from services company to product company, how they decided to pivot to building a product company and when they made the decision to go all-in on the product.  Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation is the discussion of the business...

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked with Alya Abbott , COO of Zulip , about managing community contributors. This is a hot topic for open source companies — and for that matter, open source projects in general, including those that aren’t being monetized in any way. It’s a bit of a third rail in the open source ecosystem to suggest that there’s a downside to community contributions,...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nick Veenhof, Director of Contributor Success at GitLab. GitLab has probably the most well-articulated open source strategy out there, and we talked about the two main prongs of that strategy, the co-create strategy and the dual flywheel strategy. We also talked about incentivizing individuals versus incentivizing companies and how to build re...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Aronchick , CEO and founder of Expanso , about luck and timing, building into universal truths and the reasons for Kubernetes’ success.  Before David founded Expanso (which is behind the project Bacalhau ), he was the first non-founding PM on the Kubernetes project, and we kicked off by talking a bit about what made Kubernetes so success...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Thomas Schedler , co-founder and CEO of Sulu . Sulu is a small, bootstrapped company that spun out of an agency; Thomas was recommended by someone to me as a guest, but when I first reached out to him he was skeptical about coming on the show because he wasn’t sure he was a good fit. But there’s a bunch to learn from this episode!  Spinning ou...

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Marco Möller , CEO and co-founder of Pionix . This was a fabulous conversation about a company that’s in a very different market from the usual open source company: They make firmware for EV charging stations, and are behind the EVerest project, which is part of LF Energy.  So who is part of the community open source projects that are so connec...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Julian Coccia , CTO of ScanOSS , about selling access to data while making open source software. Of course, we also talked about being an open source company that is also deep in the open source world, helping companies understand their reliance on open source code and how open source is used in their codebase.  Several things that we talked a...

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Liz Rice , Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent , which is now part of Cisco. We addressed two subjects: How to be successful as a company that donates their project to the CNCF, and the story of Isovalent’s acquisition by Cisco and the role open source played in that acquisition.  We talked about:  Trademarks. This is a very important part of wh...

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked about Open Source Manifestos with Vincent Untz , CTO of Centreon . The entire conversation focused on this idea of open source manifestos, which Vincent is going to talk about at Open Source Founders Summit — and I had never heard of before.  The idea to create an open source manifesto came about because internally there was a lot of frustration ar...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Lukas Gentele , the CEO and co-founder of LoftLabs.  Here’s some of the things we covered:  There are many open source projects at LoftLabs. We talked about what the team did differently the second time round, when they’d had the experience of creating the first project under their belt, and why they continued creating additional projects afte...

This week on the Business of Open Source I spoke with Daniel Jarjoura , an investor at Avolta who specializes in developer-facing companies, and who writes a newsletter on developer-facing startups and also collects data on investments in open source companies. We spoke about the overall state of investment for open source companies and specifically the state of investment in open source companies...

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Andrew Martin , CEO and founder of Control Plane.  Control Plane is ultimately a consulting company, as Andrew introduced it. But the company also created and maintains KubeSec , and also has an enterprise version of Flux CD that it licenses. That gives this conversation a slightly different flavor from the usual.  Here’s some of the things we...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Misha Bragin, co-founder and CEO of NetBird. This was also the first episode I recorded in 2025, which gives you an idea of how far in advance I’m recording episodes.  NetBird has an interesting origin story — it came out of an original idea to make a hardware product, but as Misha and his co-founder were starting to work out the realities of...