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. 

So why does it matter? 

• Developers prefer open source, and they’ll always choose the open source option if there is one. On the other hand, developers don’t often have buying power (and don’t even know how to buy software even if they did). But developers can influence buying decisions, and that can be important. 
• We also talked about how there are different constraints that the open source project and the cloud version operate under. For example, ease of deployment doesn’t matter in the cloud version, because it doesn’t impact user experience at all. But the opposite is the case for the open source project, and that leads to different technical decisions. 
• We talked about the problem getting information about people who use the open source project, because it is hard to get developers to talk. This is a puzzle that Tom says he still hasn’t cracked. 
• Being an open source / open core company is a distraction, and it can be hard to manage externally and internally. 
• We talked a lot about trust — how open source helps you earn trust, but you still need to earn and keep the trust. 

Want to talk more about the ins and outs of running open source businesses, and how open source companies win? Come to Open Source Founders Summit next May in Paris. And if you’re struggling to figure out how to monetize your open source company, you might want to work with me. 

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 product-market fit constantly, because the ecosystem is changing so quickly. 

Quentin mentioned hearing from an advisor earlier in his career that you can’t focus on both usage and revenue — but that in some ways you are forced to focus on both, especially now. When I asked how you decide which of the two goals you should throw more resources behind, he couldn’t say… it’s such a case-by-case decision that there isn’t an easy formula for deciding. 

Lastly, I had a burning question: What actually does go-to-market mean? And what does it mean to be a “Head of Go To Market?” Quentin says that to a large extent it’s a euphemism for sales, but there’s a little more to it than just that. In his mind, Go-To-Market is a much less siloed function than sales. It’s about getting the entire company aligned, in the expectation that ultimately that will lead to sales. But it’s not just about forcing prospects down the funnel or cold calling, either. 

Want to talk more about the specifics of go-to-market for open source companies, with people who have been there? You should join Open Source Founders Summit, an in-person conference for leadership in open source companies. The next edition will be May 18th and 19th, 2026 in Paris. 

And curious about my consulting options? Check out how I help open source companies here. 

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 companies… figuring out the balance between what goes in the open source project and what goes in the commercial offering. “Companies that get it wrong die, and companies that get it right end up flourishing,” he said. 

Or Weiss has a theory about open source businesses that he calls ‘open foundations.’ He thinks that this model is better than open core — to be honest I think open foundations is a type of open core, but I think that Or’s argument about how to do open core are fundamentally correct. 

Permit’s primary open source project is OPAL, and the way that Or puts it is that Permit uses OPAL, but it is not OPAL. The two pieces of software are different and have different value propositions. He also talked about how important it is for everyone to understand what features belong in the project and what belongs in the product… by ‘everyone’ he means product managers in your team but also members of the open source community. 

We also talked about how you have to have a moat for your product, and especially with AI coding tools a lot of models do not have a moat anymore. Which is why he doesn’t think that just SSO and a fancy UI are enough of a difference between project and product anymore. 

If you are interested in having more conversations about building open source businesses, join us next May in Paris at Open Source Founders Summit! 

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: 

• The state of open source in the semiconductor space, and why that matters. A large part of it is the high cost of proprietary software for chip design, and the fact that there are a lot of barriers to entry, both for the design software and to chip creation. 
• Rob also talked about how an open source approach is the only way to bridge between research institutions and universities and the commercial world — too often, researchers would do brilliant work during a Ph.D. program and then it would be completely lost when they entered the commercial world. 
• On the other hand, open source is little-known and mistrusted in the semiconductor space. Rob described it as a marketing liability, which is why it’s downplayed on the company webpage. —> I come across this more often than is often recognized inside the open source bubble. 

It’s one thing to build an open source company in the software infrastructure space, where open source has a positive reputation and is often seen as simply table stakes; it’s quite another to build an open source company in a conservative industry where open source doesn’t have a positive image. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that this means you have to have a reason other than marketing to build and maintain the open source project. 

Want to join others to talk about the challenges and opportunities in building open source companies? Join us at Open Source Founders Summit next spring in Paris. 

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: 

• When you’re transitioning from a services company to a product company, it’s much easier if the product you work on is connected to the services your clients are already paying for. 
• Landing a huge customer, particularly if it’s your first customer, can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a lot of revenue, but you also risk becoming your customer’s servant and losing control of your product’s roadmap. 
• You can’t do everything; and particularly you can’t build a product that meets the needs of small, medium and large organizations. 
• Sometimes you need to re-launch / reposition. Open Social recently completely changed their positioning earlier this year in response to changes in the marketplace and how their customers were use the product. 
• Customers might not care about open source, but they care very much about lock-in, exit costs, and data sovereignty. This is all a part of risk management that CIOs are thinking about a lot. 
• Some organizations use both the self-hosted and the SaaS product. 
• One of the biggest / most instructive mistakes they made was maintaining completely separate codebases. When they invested in merging the codebases, it dramatically improved the customer experience in relation to updates, bug fixes and simplicity of the engineering effort. 

 We talked about Open Source Founders Summit at the end — and which is where I first met Taco. If you’re interested in joining us in 2026, sign up for the newsletter! Tickets will be on sale soon. 

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 business stakeholders to control how Penpot is used in their organizations. So when you need gouvernance and control, you should pay for the additional product to control Penpot usage in your organization. But if you don’t need to limit how Penpot is used at all, you (and everyone else in your organization) can use the open source version without the additional controls. 

We also talked about dual audiences. Penpot has to appeal to designers and developers, and building something (and ultimately marketing/selling it) that has to appeal to two very different stakeholders. We talked about how the company manages that balance, and why they want to have more developers using Penpot than designers. 

We talked a bit about Open Source Founders Summit as well. If you’re interested in learning from other founders and leaders in open source companies, join us at Open Source Founders Summit in Paris! 

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 easy as possible for new contributors to get started. They even did user experience testing on the developer experience for contributors — and made changes as a result. 

And why does this even matter? Because when it’s done right, community contributors can end up increasing your development velocity. Especially on things like integrations, the community contributors can really push things forward. 

There’s much more to this episode, so check it out! And if you’d like more content about open source companies, or if you’re the leader of an open source company, join the mailing list for Open Source Founders Summit. 

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 you would think about time to value for software users. 

The dual flywheel strategy 

This strategy is based on the idea that as an open source company you want to simultaneously push growth in your open source user base and your customer base, and that the two should reinforce each other.  

The co-create strategy

The co-create strategy involves encouraging paying customers to contribute to the open source project. In other words, customers who are already paying are encouraged to also invest engineering resources to improve the product. Nick said that this has obvious benefits for GitLab, but it also has benefits for the customers. They end up with a much better understanding of the product, and end up getting more out of the product then they would otherwise. 

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend having a look at the GitLab Handbook, particularly the section on strategy. 

And if you want more information about working with me, check out the options here. 

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 time and a number of factors in the larger ecosystem were aligned in favor of making Kubernetes a success. 

It comes down to luck and building to where the puck is going… so how do you know where the puck is going to be a year from now? David talks about selling into basic truths. If you’re pegged to a specific technology, you’re putting yourself at huge risk. But if you are solving a problem that has always been a problem and is likely to continue to be a problem, you are more likely to be successful. 

We also talked about Adam Jacob’s talk on building a business around open source that he gave at KubeCon Salt Lake City, which you should definitely listen to. Adam Jacob also came on this podcast a year ago, and you should also listen to the episode he did. 

Lastly, we talked about how hard GTM is, and how David would invest way more into GTM, starting much earlier, if he could start over again. 

David was at Open Source Founders Summit this year, and you should come next year too! 

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 —> in my experience, one of the most common ways for open source companies to be bootstrapped, or even to be go on to raise venture capital, is to start out as a web development agency that uses a lot of open source tools.
• They are working on moving away from services and getting more revenue from the product; and Thomas talked about the advantages that they get from providing both services and developing a product-based business strategy.
• The CMS market is crowded! And everyone is open source, so being an open source company doesn’t differentiate the product at all. So how does Sulu differentiate itself in the market? Thomas talked about it. 
• I loved that Thomas talked about how important opinions and technology choices are in differentiating themselves on the market. 
• I also loved that Thomas talked about keeping some things out of the product as a way to differentiate themselves from others. Sometimes more features can deliver less value to users. 
• How being small can allow you to move quicker, and that gives Sulu and advantage over the huge players in the CMS market.
• Why differentiation and knowing your niche is so important when you’re a small company competing again large players. 

Do you need to differentiate yourself in a crowded market? You might want to work with me. 

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. 

• There aren’t many hobbyists in the community — but there are a lot of people who have professional interests in the electric vehicle industry. EVerest doesn’t focus on what Marco considers “personal” or “hobbiest” features. This was a great discussion about how understanding the target market, including for the project, leads to different feature decisions. 
• How does Pionix money? It doesn’t yet :), but we talked about various plans the company has for monetization in the future. 
• How being involved with the LF Energy has helped build trust, which is very important for a company that is only going to be selling to large companies and governments. 
• Why Marco thinks that the huge vision he has for creating firmware for EV charging stations is only possible with open source, and how he makes sure that he’s able to fund the large mission without hurting the community. 
• The balancing act with getting investors who specialize in the energy market but who don’t have experience with open source

Struggling with positioning your project or figuring out how to best monetize? You might want to work with me. 

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 source code. This is a topic that’s slightly tangential to business, but very interesting to me. If you’re using an AI code generator, you are almost certainly putting verbatim copies of open source code into your codebase, but without realizing you’re doing so and without any understanding of the license requirements. This is a huge compliance risk. 
• 2% of code generated by AI is a verbatim copy of open source code. 
• How the biggest challenges isn’t necessarily monetizing, but getting visibility into the sales funnel. It can feel random and sudden; a company appears out of nowhere ready to sign a contract because they’ve been using the open source project for months. 

This is the last week to get tickets for Open Source Founders Summit, so if you want to join other leaders of open source companies May 19th and 20th in Paris, get your tickets now! 

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 you donate a project to the CNCF (or other foundations). We talked about what you can and can not do with the name and logo of “your” project when it becomes part of the CNCF, and what that means for the competitive landscape you’re a part of. 
• How to best take advantage of the marketing benefits that being part of the CNCF brings. 
• How to create a link between the CNCF project and the company that donated it. 
• The role that Cilium and eBPF played in Isovalent’s acquisition by Cisco. 
• Why Isovalent’s relationship with open source is valuable to Cisco in and of itself. 
• How open source companies can increase the likelihood that they’ll be able to continue investing in open source post-acquisition. 
• Why it’s so important to find opportunities for collaboration. 

Want help making the link between your CNCF project and your commercial product? You might want to work with me. 

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 invested so much in open source. At the same time, there was a feeling among the engineering team that the company’s commitment to open source — and the concrete development time spent on open source — was slipping. 

After creating the manifesto, the doubts about why open source mattered went away immediately — there hasn’t been a single conversation calling into question why open source matters since the manifesto was finished. Now conversations about open source are different. 

Externally, there’s been a huge change in conversations around open source. People say things like “Centreon is back in the game.” 

It’s hard to point to concrete financial results as a result of the manifesto, but there have been differences in relationships with partners for sure, and it has helped get more companies to contribute to the project. 

Want to see what the Centreon Open Source Manifesto looks like? Check it out here. 

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 make roadmap decisions to decide what goes in the OSS versus what goes in the enterprise edition
• How they thought about the benefits to the business from open sourcing vCluster, the second project they released, and whether or not the theory about how it would benefit the business ended up being correct. 
• Whether or not open code is necessary for community building, and why. In particular, we talked about the difference in how people feel ‘ownership’ of open source projects when they contribute to them. 
• The pros and cons of building different brands around your project, your product and your company; and of having different brands around your different projects. We talked about this a lot; LoftLabs has a different company brand from any of the products or projects, but they discovered that if the project and product do not have the same brand, people get so confused that they ultimately do not buy. 

If you need to figure out how to brand your project and product, you might want to work with me. If you want an opportunity to talk with other founders about branding, community building, and more, you should join us at Open Source Founders Summit May 19th and 20th in Paris. 

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: 

• Differences between venture funding for OSS companies in Europe and in NA
• How open source companies were relatively stable in terms of getting venture funding, even as the entire venture funding ecosystem was in free-fall.
• How it might be true that European investors don’t understand open source companies, but on the other hand plenty of North American investors invest in European companies. 
• Do developers trust open core companies? We had a discussion about whether or not open source companies have a trust problem…
• How important communication is for open source companies, something that I think is very true — a lot of the problems that open source companies run into when they either adopt an open core model or even when they do a license change. 
• How founders can do a better job communicating with their VCs, including how to do a better job targeting appropriate investors. 
• What do optimizing for in the VC relationship … and spoiler alert, that is for money. You might want a perfect VC who can make introductions, give you advice, give you money, be nice, etc. But the most important thing is the cash; focus on that. The second most important is the introductions. But advice isn’t something you should count on from VCs, and that really isn’t a VCs job, anyway. 
• We finished the conversation with a discussion about M&A for open source companies. 

If you want good advice about your open source company, you might want to work with me. If you want an opportunity to talk with other founders about things like M&A for open source companies, communicating with VCs, and other topics specific to open source companies, you should join us at Open Source Founders Summit May 19th and 20th in Paris. 

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: 

• The business ROI that Andrew expected to get from releasing KubeSec, and whether or not he as actually seen those expected results play out
• The difference between bootstrapping a company by offering services and by offering consulting — specifically what the difference between services and consulting is. 
• The problem with “drive-by” feature development in open source projects — when people contribute features but don’t commit to the ongoing maintenance of the project
• Why Control Plane decided to release an enterprise version of FluxCD, and how the enterprise version of Flux is differentiated from the pure open source project. 
• Why underinvesting in marketing, especially in marketing for the open source projects, was a mistake

Join us at Open Source Founders Summit if you want more conversations about how companies are built around open source projects, from consultancies to large corporations. 

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 take aways from the conversation: 

• Sometimes your users want to pay you! Misha explained that before there was a commercial offering, some open source users proactively reached out asking for one — because they understood that in order for the company to be viable, it needed to have revenue. 
• Just because you get crickets at first doesn’t mean your project sucks. When NetBird’s open source project was first released, it made zero splash.
• The reality of working in a proprietary piece of software, you can do things quick and dirty. *Obviously you shouldn’t, but let’s face it a lot of people do. But when your code is open, it is also a part of your communication strategy! If you push out code that’s not tested or that’s not well done, you risk reputation damage even if the software works exactly as it should. 
• Misha talked about how choosing Auth0 as an authentication service was a mistake — not because it is a bad service, but because it was not appropriate for their target audience, who are self-hosting. This is a very good reminder of how sometimes choosing the best technology for the job can backfire; you also have to take into account who the target user is and if they are going to be repelled by the choice you’re making. 

Struggling to figure out how to balance your project development with your product development? Need to supercharge your funnel? You might want to work with me. Want to share your knowledge and learn from your peers who are open source entrepreneurs? You should join us at Open Source Founders Summit May 19th and 20th in Paris. 

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 your software, is something that is important to your for either strategic or philosophical reasons, the absolute best way to accomplish this goal is with an open source project. 

In the case of Continue, being open source, and allowing companies to retain control over their data, is also a differentiation in the market. 

There was also a phrase in the conversation that I wanted to pull out — Ty talked about monetizing “next to” the open source project. This is precisely how many of the most successful open source companies work. They have a successful open source project but monetize it in a way that is adjacent, rather than directly competing with the project. 

Check out the full episode for a discussion about the AI hype wave and how it intersects with open source business models. 

If you want more discussions about open source companies, you shouldn’t miss Open Source Founders Summit this May 19th and 20th — it’s the only event specifically designed for leadership in open source companies. 

And if you’re struggling with your open source strategy, you should consider working with me. 

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 a bit unclear on the role of a CFO — whereas I’ve never spoken with a founder who had trouble understanding what their CTO does. Here’s some takeaways from our conversation: 

• Part of the CFO’s role is about thinking about open source strategically, in terms of how the open source project is going to fit into the company’s overall strategy.
• Because open source is so ingrained in the company, it doesn’t fit into a single budget line item; it’s impossible to break out and say ‘we spend $X on open source’ because it’s so integrated into everything the company does
• How do you measure your ROI on investment in open source? 
• At Sysdig, two out of three prospects come to the company because of Falco, their open source project. 
• We also talked about the ecosystem effects of having a huge footprint with your open source project; it’s hard to measure the positive influence of having massive brand awareness, but both CFOs are convinced that it is very important to the company. 
• Eileen says that many CIOs now have mandates to look for open source solutions when possible, which was not the case a decade ago. That’s changed the dynamic for a company like Percona that’s based around open source. 

Another reason I did this episode is because while I usually have founders on the podcast, there are some really important perspectives from other leadership team members. Part of the the role of a CEO is to understand all the other C-level leadership position’s roles and responsibilities, and in my experience the CFO is one of the less well understood roles. In fact, we wrapped up the conversation by talking about how a CFO can be a real strategic partner that’s forward-thinking rather than just the bean-counter that some people expect a CFO to be. 

A couple things to mention. First of all, if you want to learn more about my consulting work with open source companies, you can do so here. Second, if you want to chance to connect with other founders of open source companies, consider joining Open Source Founders Summit this May 19th and 20th in Paris.