The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jesse Williams and Brad Micklea , co-founders of Jozu and each with a long history of experience in various open source companies behind them. Even though Jozu is young, there was a lot to learn from these two and their experience in both open source and non-open source businesses. We talked about open source and not open source from CodeEnvy,...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jimmy Zelinskie , co-founder and CPO of Authzed , which is behind SpiceDB.  We kicked off the discussion with a really interesting discussion about whether or not SpiceDB is a database and whether or not Authzed is a database company. At first they didn’t see it that way, but as soon as they started leaning in on describing the product as a da...

This week on the Business of Open Source I had Galeal Zino , CEO and founder of NetFoundry , which creates OpenZiti.  One of the most interesting things about the this conversation was the conversation about how to balance whether you’re promoting the product or the project. I talk to a lot of founders who assume that because you have both, you have to promote both. The same goes for SaaS and onpr...

Pretix founder and CEO Raphael Michel has a completely different philosophy about what he is building compared to the big players in the event / ticketing platform space. We had a great conversation this week about Pretix, how Pretix is positioned compared to big players, and who care about the fact that Pretix is an open source company.  Some takeaways:  Pretix is a small company, but Raphael fee...

This week on the The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ashraf Samhouri , the CEO and co-founder of Activepieces.  Activepieces didn’t start as an open source company — and we started out the conversation by talking about why it was important to take an open source route because Activepieces is building an ecosystem.  Some other highlights from the episode:  Making software that is both for tec...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Per Ploug Krogslund , who is currently  senior director of developer programs at Docker, and who previously had a number of experiences at the intersection of open source and business. He founded and ran an open source company, Umbraco , for many years, and also led the Open Source Program Office at Spotify.  We had a wide-ranging conversation...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Tom Wilkie , CTO at Grafana Labs . We talked about how he had a 10-month run building a startup before ultimately joining Grafana in an acquisition — why he thought that was the right move at the time and how it’s developed since then. But Tom has also had a long career in open source businesses, and we had plenty to talk about.  My favorite...

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Mike Milinkovich , executive director at the Eclipse Foundation . We had a wide-ranging conversation about the role of open source foundations in the open source ecosystem, especially as related to open source businesses.  The existence of open source foundations, and how companies decide to engage (or not) with them, is one of the aspects of o...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Vinoth Chandar , the founder and CEO of Onehouse and the creator of Apache Hudi. We took a pretty deep dive into the relationship between Onehouse and Hudi, a topic that for me is at the heart of building a company on top of an open source project. In fact, whether or not Onehouse is an ‘open source company’ could be debatable; Hudi is an Apac...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Joe Duffy , co-founder and CEO of Pulumi. We kicked off the conversation by talking about why Pulumi is open source in the first place — a mix of Joe’s long-standing interest in open source and a feeling like a developer tool like Pulumi just has to be open source in order to be taken seriously. But there was another reason, too: Pulumi’s foun...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tyler Jewell — for the second time, now. Last time I spoke with Tyler, he was an investor at Dell Technologies Capital , he’s since taken over as CEO of Lightbend.  We talked about a lot, but there was a definite theme to our conversation: License changes. Lightbend had been running an open core model, with the open core using a permissive Apa...

This week on The Business of Open Source I have an episode I recorded on site at AI-Dev in Paris with Justin Cormack , CTO of Docker . We finally get around to talking about AI at the very end of the episode, but otherwise we talked business and open source and how Docker manages both. Here’s some of the take aways from the episode: There are upsides and downsides to being an open source company,...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Karthik Ranganathan , founder and co-CEO of Yugabyte. This is the second time Karthik has been on the podcast, but since three years had passed I thought it’d be a good idea to catch up and see what’s changed at Yugabyte and how his perspective on the open source commercial ecosystem has changed.  Some really cool topics came up in this conver...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with André Eriksson , founder and CEO at Encore. We talked about how open source develops trust, something I also discussed in the episode I recorded with Reshma Khilnani . For Encore, it’s subtly different, though. In the case of Medplum, open source is a differentiator in a market that’s used to black boxes, for Encore, open source is tablestakes...

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Saurav Pathak , chief product officier at Bagisto , about a very different kind of business relationship with open source — and open source software incubated in a larger company. There were tons of interesting nuggets in this episode, but some things I wanted to call out are: For open source projects, the tech stack that the project is built w...

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Tanmai Gopal, co-founder of Hasura. We talked about how Hasura grew out of Tanmai’s previous company, which was a consulting company. I like to call out examples of really novel open source businesses, but in fact the thing that stuck with me from the conversation with Tanmai was that Hasura is going the ‘classic’ route… and it’s working.  What...

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Reshma Khilnani , CEO and founder of Medplum. Medplum is an open source electronic health record development platform, and one of the things I loved about this conversation is that Reshma is so focused on the healthcare industry — a level of focus that I find relatively rare in open source companies. And not only that, when I asked her if she t...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Adam Jacob , founder and CEO of System Initiative and formerly the CTO and co-founder at Chef. We had a wide-ranging conversation that at times veered into the philosophical (what is the meaning for ‘strategy’?) but also has plenty of concrete, practical insights.  We talked about: The difference between being the CTO and being the CEO of a st...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I had a very different sort of guest — Mark Boost , the CEO and founder of Civo . We talked not only about Mark’s history as an entrepreneur, but also Civo’s recent acquisition of KubeFirst. This topic caught my eye because it’s not often I get an offer to talk with an acquirer of open source companies, and I wanted to take him up on it. (Though if you mis...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Brian Fox , co-founder and CTO of Sonatype . In addition to having a really interesting discussion about the usual topic of how to build a business around open source software, we also had a good conversation about security — it was hard to avoid, because we recorded this right after the xz backdoor discovery, and software supply chain securit...

This week on The Business of Open Source I had Rod Johnson , founder/CEO of Spring Source and creator of the Spring Framework (as well as board member of many other open source companies) on to talk about Spring, monetizing open source and what’s changed in the open source ecosystem since 2008.  Key takeaways: Consulting was burning the entire team out, and that threatened the health not just of t...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with BoxyHQ co-founder and CEO Deepak Prabhakara . We talked about a number of things, from BoxyHQ’s relationship with its open source project, called SAML Jackson to how to build a growth flywheel and how that flywheel does and does not depend on a community.  Is BoxyHQ a security company? Does it matter either way?  Starting the open source proje...

In the second episode that I recorded on-site at KubeCon EU in Paris, I spoke with Alex Olivier , CPO and co-founder of Cerbos . This was not a general discussion: It was focused on the process that Cerbos went through to figure out pricing.  Here’s what we talked about: The first step of figuring out your pricing is not the number, but rather what you’re charging for. Is it API calls, or amount o...

This week, I had a dilemma: should I prioritize the episode where I spoke with one of the MariaDB co-founders, in which we discuss setting up a foundation as a way to ensure that the project continues to be open source in the future, no matter what (relevant given the Redis announcement); or should I prioritize the conversation with one of the founders of Sonatype, one of the oldest companies in t...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have an episode recorded on site at KubeCon EU in Paris with William Morgan , CEO of Buoyant. We had a fabulous conversation, which touched on some touchy subjects, including Buoyant’s slightly changing relationship with Linkerd . But we talked about: Being an open source mercenary, but also being dedicated to making Linkerd a ‘proper’ open source projec...