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 technical users (engineers love Activepieces!) and non-technical users (who also love Activepieces, becaus...
Aug 14, 2024•35 min•Ep 220•Transcript available on Metacast 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 about open source businesses. Some of the topics we covered: What is the right size for an open sourc...
Aug 07, 2024•43 min•Ep 219•Transcript available on Metacast 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 quote: “I’ve always seen open source as a privilege of successful businesses, so I want to be a succe...
Jul 31, 2024•45 min•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast 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 open source businesses that is truly unique. Perhaps one of the key things to keep in mind from this c...
Jul 24, 2024•40 min•Ep 217•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Apache project — it’s not owned by Onehouse in anyway — and Onehouse is not a ‘managed Hudi’ or ‘enterpr...
Jul 17, 2024•42 min•Ep 216•Transcript available on Metacast 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 founders weren’t just in it to build a company, they wanted to transform their industry and build a last...
Jul 10, 2024•40 min•Ep 215•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Apache license. The company’s open source project, Akka, is massively popular. Lightben had about $13 mi...
Jul 03, 2024•52 min•Ep 214•Transcript available on Metacast 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, and you should absolutely make sure you are leveraging the upsides. Because they don’t necessarily t...
Jun 26, 2024•49 min•Ep 213•Transcript available on Metacast 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 conversation. For example: Why engineers don’t choose databases based on features (and how this is related ...
Jun 19, 2024•48 min•Ep 212•Transcript available on Metacast 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 in a market that won’t adopt a completely proprietary software. We talked about: Launching with a c...
Jun 12, 2024•42 min•Ep 211•Transcript available on Metacast 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 with can in fact be a differentiating feature. This is unique to open source (and has come up before,...
Jun 05, 2024•38 min•Ep 210•Transcript available on Metacast 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 does the ‘classic’ route look like to me? It’s an open source project that targets individual develo...
May 29, 2024•45 min•Ep 209•Transcript available on Metacast 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 thought the company’s focus was too narrow, she responded that actually she often worries that it’s t...
May 22, 2024•40 min•Ep 208•Transcript available on Metacast 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 startup, even if you’re a founder in both cases (and why Adam wanted to try out the CEO role this time)...
May 15, 2024•47 min•Ep 207•Transcript available on Metacast 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 missed it, I also talked to Thomas di Giacomo about this topic, and it was fabulous). The that is diffe...
May 08, 2024•28 min•Ep 206•Transcript available on Metacast 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 security is kind of Brian’s thing. Business-wise, though, we also covered some really cool topics. Includin...
May 01, 2024•45 min•Ep 205•Transcript available on Metacast 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 the consulting business, but of the open source project as well An amazing salesperson can often sell ...
Apr 24, 2024•47 min•Ep 204•Transcript available on Metacast 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 project at the same time as the company, and why they did it that way The relationship between the user com...
Apr 17, 2024•36 min•Ep 203•Transcript available on Metacast 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 of data you’re processing, or monthly active users, or monthly active principles… that last one is wha...
Apr 10, 2024•25 min•Ep 202•Transcript available on Metacast 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 the software supply chain security space, in which we talk about the xz debacle. I went with Patrick ...
Apr 03, 2024•36 min•Ep 201•Transcript available on Metacast 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 project Feeling like open source was table stakes for a company in the space Buoyant plays in. This is an ...
Mar 27, 2024•35 min•Ep 200•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source I talked to Heather Meeker , General Partner of OSS Capital and author of From Project to Profit, How to Build a Business around your Open Source Project. We talked about some things that I entirely agree with, and then there were some points I challenged Heather on — all in all, it was fabulous conversation. Here’s what we covered: Why you should think of your project and product as two different products so you avoid thinking of your open source project...
Mar 20, 2024•37 min•Ep 199•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Pranay Prateek , co-founder of SigNoz . Pranay talked about why open source is important to SigNoz's business, why it's super important to deliver value quickly, even for an observability product, and why founders shouldn't think of open source just as a distribution model. We also covered: How SigNoz is differentiated in the crowded observability market Why Pranay thinks being open source makes it much easier for developers to play around wi...
Mar 13, 2024•39 min•Ep 198•Transcript available on Metacast In this special episode to promote Open Source Founders Summit , I went deep with Thomas di Giacomo about how open source companies can position themselves as attractive acquisition targets for strategic buyers. If you are the founder of an open source company and you have the idea of being acquired even in the back of your mind, this is a must-listen episode. Whether or not you plan to join us May 27th and 28th in Paris, though of course we hope you do join us. By the way, at OSFS Thomas is goi...
Mar 12, 2024•33 min•Ep 197•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Zach Wasserman , co-founder and CTO of Fleet . This was a fabulous episode for many reasons, but then again I never do crappy episodes, right? The first thing I wanted to call your attention to is that Zach talked about how he’s building an open core business because building an open source business is what he wants to do. When his previous company turned away from open source, Zach left to do consulting around OSquery and Fleet (the project...
Mar 06, 2024•38 min•Ep 196•Transcript available on Metacast Slightly different The Business of Open Source episode today! I spoke with Patrick McFadin and Mick Semb Wever about the relationship between Apache Cassandra and DataStax — how it was at the beginning and how the relationship has evolved over the years. We talked about: — How there was a dynamic around Cassandra where many of the many of the contributors ended up being sucked into the DataStax orbit, simply because it allowed those contributors to work on on Cassandra full-time — How there can ...
Feb 28, 2024•40 min•Ep 195•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the Open Source Founders Podcast, I talked with Frank Karlitschek , CEO and founder of Nextcloud . Frank is going to be talking specifically about lead generation at Open Source Founders Summit , but in this episode we took a slightly wider view and talked about go to market, for open source companies in general and specifically for Frank’s experience at Nextcloud. A couple other things to pull out as takeaways. First of all, Frank talks about how he originally planned to targ...
Feb 22, 2024•30 min•Ep 194•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Percona CEO Ann Schlemmer. This episode was recorded on site at State of Open Con in London, outside in a van! There’s a ton of great info in this episode, too. First of all, Ann talked about being a ‘suit’ in a geek’s world and her career trajectory that led her to lead Percona. She also set the stage around the constraints that Percona has chosen for itself: To be completely open source and only sell services, and to be completely bootstra...
Feb 21, 2024•31 min•Ep 193•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with four-time entrepreneur Mike Schwartz , CEO and founder of Gluu as well as the host of Open Source Underdogs podcast, about his long career in entrepreneurship. Here’s some particularly interesting things to take out of this episode: “Beware an entrepreneur’s second company.” — Mike says his second company was a disaster because he tried to apply the lessons from the first company in the second, and often those lessons aren’t right for...
Feb 14, 2024•35 min•Ep 192•Transcript available on Metacast As part of the preparation for Open Source Founders Summit , I’m interviewing both our speakers and our attendees for a special podcast that’s hyper focused on one thing. In this episode I spoke with Peter Zaitsev , founder of Percona , about sales. We talked about the specifics of sales as a bootstrapped company — which means sales are exceptionally critical from the beginning, and how sales changed as the company moved from a consulting model to a support model on the open source software that...
Feb 12, 2024•34 min•Ep 191•Transcript available on Metacast 
