The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Adam Jacob, co-founder and CEO of the Swamp Club. 

The first thing we talked about was When To Quit. System Initiative, Adam’s second company (after Chef), was one he ultimately shut down after deciding that he just didn’t have product-market fit. The idea of when to quit is an important one — I personally like Annie Duke’s book on the subject. We all have limited time and energy, and knowing when to abandon one project (or pivot from an experiment that isn’t wor...

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Dima Grossman, founder and CTO at Novu. 

For Novu, being open source is part of the go to market strategy. Dima says a big part of the motivation behind going open source to get the widest possible adoption for Novu. It was also a way for Novu to be different in a relatively crowded market, one that serves many developers but that didn’t have a real open source player. 

Aside from being a go to market stra...

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Kris Zyp, SVP of engineering at HarperDB, in the third and final episode in the series about how Harper went from a closed-source company to an open source company. 

We talked about what Kris saw as the risks and benefits of going open source before they went open source, how they ended up deciding what went into the open source project versus in the enterprise edition, and where the gray areas where. 

The CEO of Harper, Stephen Go...

In today’s episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Matt Watson, CEO of Fullscale, about a number of topics related to product development and how AI is changing that. 

Let’s start with a question: What is the difference between a software engineer and a software developer? Matt thinks there is a key difference: software engineers write code, and software developers figure out how to solve customer problems with software. What do you think is more valuable in a world where AI agents can write the code for you? 

...

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talk with Julien Verlaguet, the CEO of Skiplabs. Julien is a programming language guy, and we talked about what it means to maintain an open source programming language. 

We talked about what it means to monetize a a programming language… or, as Julien says, you do not. So why does maintaining SKIP pay off for the team at Skiplabs? And how exactly do they make money? 

Skiplabs builds products using SKIP, and they focus on building products that can and do t...

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Joshua Drake, president and CTO of Command Prompt, about business management, bootstrapping versus taking investment, and AI, open source and open source businesses. 

This episode is a real no-bullshit take on how human psychology influences how leaders behave, how people identify with open source ecosystems and specific technology, and how people in open source should focus more on the outcomes that they want to achieve for clients or for their company rather than making their identity about being an open source developer o...

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 open source company from the very beginning and why they choose the moment in question to go open source. 

He says that 80 to 90% of the eff...

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 is not hype? How many people are actually using AI and getting value from it. 

It’s hard...

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 company to start the open source project with the explicit goal of building a company around it, and it...

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 give AI enough source material to work with, at least when it comes to ‘traditional’ code. So while perhaps there are issues with types of code...

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 important to have a foundation that’s specific to agentic AI and what it means, in terms of everyday activities, to be t...

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, why he considered it a huge success. And then he talks about what started happening when bots entered the picture. 

He a...

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 behind the program as well as some preliminary results. 

The strategy comes down to shifting the percepti...

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 source company, but the open source nature of the company isn’t plastered all over every piece of marketing material. 

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 is changing now. 

We talked about the need to find product-market fit, particularly in the AI era — Quentin says that AI companies need to find...

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 are all separate from the permit.io brand. On the other hand, Or talked about the essential balancing act for open source co...

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: 

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: 

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 model. It’s almost like open core in reverse. Penpot open source is fully featured and very flexible; but there’s a separate product available for busin...

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, but there undoubtably is. 

At Zulip, they think about the contribution process as a product. They think about the contributor experience and making it as eas...

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 recognition system as part of the way to encourage people to contribute. We also talked about how to make sure that contributing is accessible — thinking about the “time to success” for contributors in a similar way as how yo...

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 successful… and you probably can guess that it didn’t have to do with having the most awesome technology. A big part of it was that it was the right t...

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! 

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 connected to hardware? Here’s what we talked about. 

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 about: 

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: 

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 around Centreon’s relationship with open source. A lot of people, especially those who didn’t come from an engineering background, would routinely ask why the company...

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: 

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 in Europe. 

Here’s what we talked about: 

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 talked about: 

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 some of the...

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 build on top of...

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 spoken with are...

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: 

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: 

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 W...

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 dona...

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 they were still on Uber’s payroll me...

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 your company’s trajectory looks like an unmitigated success. And that is...

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 made, he said he was 50% happy w...