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!