The Business of Open Source

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. 

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 o...

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 ...

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 out from an agency —>...

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 w...

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: 

• AI and open...

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 what you donate when...

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 relations...

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 after that. 
• How they ...

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...

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 rea...

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 ecos...

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 particula...

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 sourc...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...