This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Mark Fussell, CEO and co-founder of Diagrid and co-creator of Dapr, in a special episode recorded on-site at KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City. 

We kicked off with a discussion of what’s different about running an open source company versus a proprietary software company, and Mark said that a big part of it is that you have to nurture the community. 

But what does that actually mean? I pushed back, and happily Mark was able to go into more specifics about what he means. We also talked about: 

• Why, and how, to build a contributor ladder. —> worth noting here that not all companies even want to encourage outside contributions, so it was interesting to hear Mark go into this dynamic. 
• Dapr is now a graduated project at the CNCF, and Mark talked about what changed for Dapr as a result of getting that seal of approval… as well as what changed for Diagrid. And since Diagrid is the primary maintainer of the project, this probably means Diagrid will end up spending more engineering resources on the project. 
• The constraints that come from having your open source project hosted by the CNCF — or any other open source foundation, for that matter. 
• The delicate balance between the engineering resources you need to put into your open source project and the engineering resources you put into your commercial product. 
• Even though Dapr has many (around 4,000) outside contributors, it takes a huge amount of effort (and effort = money) to manage that community, and Mark talked frankly about the investment it requires to make that happen. 
• What percentage of the open source users even know that Diagrid exists? 😳 Mark guesses that it’s 5%, and he talks about what he’s tried doing at Diagrid to make that percentage go up. Is 5% good or bad? We talked about how it’s hard to know, actually, how Dapr/Diagrid compares on that. 

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Are you struggling to figure out how your investment in open source translates to revenue? Do you want to figure how to increase the percentage of users who even know the commercial product exists? You might want to work with me.