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 manufacturing, they realized that they would be better off building a software company. Here were som...
Mar 05, 2025•36 min•Ep 250•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ty Dunn , founder of Continue.dev , which is an open source AI code assistant. We had a fabulous conversation that touched on both the AI hype wave and why open source. The first thing I’d like to touch on is why Continue.dev is open source, in other words, what business rationale Ty has for taking that route. Because he makes some great points about building an ecosystem. If building an ecosystem, and encouraging people in your community to...
Feb 26, 2025•41 min•Ep 249•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source I had a slightly different conversation: I spoke with the CFOs of two open source companies, Sysdig and Percona, to better understand what is different (and what is not) about financial management in open source companies. Karen Walker is the CFO at Sysdig, and Eileen Doody is the CFO at Percona. They both joined me to talk about the CFO role in general and the CFO role in particular at an open source company. Why did I do this episode? Many founders I’ve...
Feb 19, 2025•37 min•Ep 248•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ivan Burazin , the CEO and co-founder of Daytona . First of all, Daytona was one of the sponsors of the first edition of Open Source Founders Summit , and I had a chance to meet Ivan in person at the event. So a big thank you to him for taking a risk on the first year of the event! But let’s get down to business. We talked about: Why Daytona took an open source approach, even though they originally started out with a pure commercial licensed...
Feb 06, 2025•39 min•Ep 247•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Ludovic Dubost , founder and CEO of XWiki about the long history of XWiki, which he started in 2003. This was a wide-ranging conversation… here’s some of the things we covered: Why XWiki is an open source company. Ludovic started out with the explicit goal of creating a company, so why start it as an open source company? The reality that starting a software company in Europe means putting yourself at a disadvantage — which doesn’t mean that...
Jan 29, 2025•46 min•Ep 246•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with John O’Nolan , the co-founder of ghost.org . Before further ado, John is going to be one of speakers at Open Source Founders Summit 2025, so if you’d like a chance to dive deeper into any of the subjects we talked about on the podcast with him, in person, you should join us in May. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits to pull out from this conversation. First of all, I think it’s interesting that Ghost came about because Wordpress was moving...
Jan 22, 2025•44 min•Ep 245•Transcript available on Metacast In the last episode of The Business of Open Source recorded at KubeCon Salt Lake City, I spoke with Omri Gazitt , co-founder and CEO of Aserto. Aserto has two open source project that it maintains, one of which it donated to the CNCF. In this episode, we talked about the decision to donate a project to the CNCF — both what the process entailed and what is in for Aserto in having a project at the CNCF. But of course Aserto also has another project, Topaz , which it has not donated to the CNCF. We...
Jan 15, 2025•24 min•Ep 244•Transcript available on Metacast This special episode recorded live at KubeCon Salt Lake City last November is with Martin Mao , CEO and co-founder at Chronosphere. We talked about how M3 was foundational to the early history of Chronosphere, and how the ability to leverage M3, which Martin and his co-founder had written while they were still working at Uber. One of the most important aspects of this story is that since M3 is the foundation Chronosphere is built on, the fact that it was developed over four years at Uber while t...
Jan 10, 2025•21 min•Ep 243•Transcript available on Metacast Happy new year everyone! There was a short break for Christmas + New Years the past two weeks, but this week I’m back with a fabulous episode with Wei Lien Dang , General Partner at Unusual Ventures and formerly co-founder of StackRox. I recorded this episode on-site at KubeCon Salt Lake City back in November 2024. This episode is particularly fabulous because Wei was willing to give some founder real talk. This is easier once you’ve sold your company, and especially easier when the ‘outcome’ of...
Jan 06, 2025•27 min•Ep 242•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I have a special episode recorded on-site at KubeCon NA this fall, with Ramiro Berrelleza , the CEO of Okteto. We kicked off the conversation with a discussion about branding. Okteto is the name of the company, the name of the project and the name of the product. We started this conversation because it had been a big part of conversations I had with other founders at KubeCon. Most interesting to me was that while Ramiro explained how that decision was ma...
Dec 18, 2024•24 min•Ep 241•Transcript available on Metacast This week on the Business of Open Source, I have an episode recorded on-site at KubeCon SLC last month with Cole Kennedy , co-founder of TestifySec . We kicked off the conversation with a discussion about software development practices in the US Department of Defense and the US government at large — and the challenges involved with deploying quickly and frequently when you have to keep things both compliant and security. Here are some of the take aways from the conversation: Why TestifySec decid...
Dec 11, 2024•18 min•Ep 240•Transcript available on Metacast Who pays for the future of infrastructure? In this special episode, I spoke to Bobby DeSimone , founder and CEO of Pomerium , about how he feels like infrastructure and security both have to be open source — but then, what does that mean about the future of the financial support for infrastructure and security? We talked about: The importance for customers, especially early customers, of being able to do code audits early in the buying cycle — and Bobby thought that just a BSL license would not ...
Dec 04, 2024•19 min•Ep 239•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Mark Fussell , CEO and co-founder of Diagrid and co-creator of Dapr , in a special episode recorded on-site at KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City. We kicked off with a discussion of what’s different about running an open source company versus a proprietary software company, and Mark said that a big part of it is that you have to nurture the community. But what does that actually mean? I pushed back, and happily Mark was able to go into more specif...
Nov 28, 2024•23 min•Ep 238•Transcript available on Metacast In this last special episode of The Business of Open Source recorded at All Things Open, I spoke with Elias Voelker , VP North America for CheckMK . We talked a lot about product strategy; when CheckMK decided that they needed a clear strategy for deciding which feature goes in the open source project and which goes in the commercial version. Elias finished up the conversation by circling back on this issue: As an open source company, if you don't have a big enough difference between the value c...
Nov 26, 2024•18 min•Ep 237•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I have the first episode I recorded on-site at KubeCon Salt Lake City (and the only full-length episode), with Solomon Hykes , CEO and co-founder of Dagger, and co-founder of Docker. One thing Solomon mentions briefly but that is very important is that there are limits to what can be learned from Docker’s story, simply because the situation was so unique. Docker experienced explosive growth, at least some of which was due to having the right technology a...
Nov 20, 2024•39 min•Ep 236•Transcript available on Metacast In this special episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nithya Ruff , director of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office (often referred to as an OSPO). We started out talking a little about what exactly an OSPO is and what they do in companies — something I’m guess not everyone understands. It boils down to managing the company’s open source strategy — something that is relevant to pretty much any company that writes software of any kind. There are a lot of components to an open sourc...
Nov 13, 2024•16 min•Ep 235•Transcript available on Metacast In this special episode recorded at All Things Open , I talk with Peter Farkas , CEO and co-founder of FerretDB . We talked about about MongoDB and the license change fiasco and why Peter wanted to build an open source company and never considered building a non-open source company. The biggest 🤯 in this episode was about enforcing what it means to be open source; in particular, FerretDB positions itself as a truly open source alternative to MongoDB, and has received threatening letters from Mo...
Nov 12, 2024•16 min•Ep 234•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s full-length episode is with Bhaskar , founder of YottaDB . This episode was recorded on-site at All Things Open last week, and we covered a wide range of topics. Including: How the open source ecosystem, and the open source business ecosystem, has changed over the past 30+ years. Who can responsibly self-support an open source database, and who really needs to have someone to call if things go wrong. The spectrum of professionalism among open source developers How YottaDB started out...
Nov 06, 2024•29 min•Ep 233•Transcript available on Metacast This special episode of The Business of Open Source with Tatiana Krupenya , CEO of DBeaver , was recorded on site at All Things Open 2024. It’s a short conversation, so we addressed one main question: What is the difference between running an open source company versus as proprietary software company? Tatiana says the difference is big — and it’s complicated. The bottom line: Your OSS can be your main competitor, and your customers have to really see the value in your commercial offering if you ...
Nov 05, 2024•13 min•Ep 232•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Stefano Maffulli , Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative , about the definition of open source and… the definition of open source AI. We recorded this episode on-site at All Things Open, so there’s a little bit of background noise. We talked about why OSI felt like it needed to develop a definition of open source AI, how “open source” is enforced, and the thought process behind the definition that the OSI ultimately published. We ...
Oct 30, 2024•32 min•Ep 231•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick , the co-CEO of Grist Labs and CTO of Grist Labs. We talked about managing growth of users versus growth of revenue, moving to an open source approach for technical, not technical, reasons, and open-source related product management questions for open source companies. Some really interesting themes we talked about: Moving from a SaaS first approach to also focusing on enterprise sales. Why they did that...
Oct 23, 2024•42 min•Ep 230•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs . We had a really far-ranging conversation that included talking about why documentation is often so bad, why documentation should be a priority, but also Eric’s experience building Read the Docs and Write the Docs . This episode was interesting because it’s both about building an open source company and also about the importance documentation for software projects in general and open source project...
Oct 16, 2024•46 min•Ep 229•Transcript available on Metacast Today on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Chris Holmes , co-founder and CEO of Greymatter. Greymatter is deeply involved in the open source ecosystem and maintains the Go Envoy Control Plane, but Chris is adamant that it is not an open source company. We had a great discussion about why that is, what it means for the company and the conversations he ends up having around open source with his customers and partner companies. Some particularly interesting points that came up: Customers wo...
Oct 09, 2024•44 min•Ep 228•Transcript available on Metacast This week on the Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Höck, co-founder of Vendure. We talked about switching licenses from MIT to GPL, the ways that Vendure is different from it’s competitors and how architectural decisions can be a powerful differentiator for an open source company. Favorite quote: “You need to build your product together with your clients.” Some specifics we talked about that you should pay attention to: Why they switched to GPL in order to encourage more people to reac...
Oct 02, 2024•41 min•Ep 227•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Allard Buijze, the CTO and founder at AxonIQ . We talked a lot about the importance of open source for getting feedback on your product and validating your idea — or not. One of the things we talked about was how the beginning of AxonIQ was tied to the same consultancy that developed Spring Source; Rod Johnson, the founder and CEO of Spring Source was on the podcast a couple months ago and you can listen to that episode here. We talked abou...
Sep 25, 2024•45 min•Ep 226•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Robert Hodges , CEO of Altinity. This is a great example of an open source company that is built on top of an open source project, ClickHouse, that they did not create and still do not have direct control over. Altinity has created and maintains other open source projects in the ClickHouse ecosystem as well, but So many things to unpack with this episode, but a couple I want to call attention to in particular. The origin story of how Altinit...
Sep 18, 2024•43 min•Ep 225•Transcript available on Metacast 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, Red Hat, AWS and Docker. “It’s very hard to get a sustainable open source project if you don’t have...
Sep 11, 2024•45 min•Ep 224•Transcript available on Metacast 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 database, the more successful they were at getting people in their community to quickly understand what...
Sep 04, 2024•45 min•Ep 223•Transcript available on Metacast 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 onprem options — some people think that just because you offer both, you have to build a go to market fun...
Aug 28, 2024•38 min•Ep 222•Transcript available on Metacast 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 feels like it is able to have a much broader feature set than the big players like Eventbrite I think of ...
Aug 21, 2024•40 min•Ep 221•Transcript available on Metacast 
