Software Engineering Daily

Open source projects benefit from the network effects of a large audience of developers. A popular open source project will be contributed to and used by thousands of developers, who are continuously testing, deploying, and improving the software. The open source movement has created massive communities and a thriving, collaborative economy.

Infrastructure software companies are increasingly built within an open source business model. Databases, queueing systems, orchestrators, operating systems, and search engines have been started as freely available open source projects, and leveraged into billion dollar businesses. In previous shows we have talked about business strategy, go-to-market tactics, and licensing of infrastructure software.

There remains plenty of room for more open source infrastructure companies. We still need better databases and distributed systems management. But over time, open source will move up the stack. From Netflix to Uber to social networks to payments systems–all software verticals will become open source because the benefits of making your software open source outweigh the costs.

For many software business models, the competitive advantage is not found in their source code–it’s in their data, their network effects, their sales strategy, and their brand.

Therefore, it makes sense that someday the source code will be freely available, democratizing the infrastructure concerns and letting these software businesses move up the value chain and become less operationally intensive at the bottom of the stack. Rather than asking “why should we open source our code”, these companies will be asking “why shouldn’t we open source our code?”

Joseph Jacks is the founder of OSS Capital, a venture capital firm that invests exclusively in commercial OSS startup companies. Joe believes that over time, open source eats everything. In today’s show, we talk about the future of open source businesses, the impact of licensing, cloud providers, and cryptocurrencies.

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Open source software powers everything we do on the Internet. Google runs on Linux servers. Content sites are served by WordPress. Our data is queued in Kafka clusters and stored in MongoDB instances.

The success of an open source project often leads to the creator of that open source software becoming wealthy. An open source project can be monetized through enterprise add-ons, or consultation, or simplified hosting. The creators of open source software know their domains so well, that they are usually well-suited to operate this kind of open source business.

Open source business model success stories include Elastic (ElasticSearch), Cloudera (Hadoop), and Red Hat.

The rise in usage of cloud providers has changed the viability of some open source business models. AWS can monetize almost any open source project more profitably than the creators. This is because AWS has established distribution channels.

If I already run my application on AWS, and I am looking for someone to provide me with a hosted version of a database, I will probably choose the hosted database that AWS provides.

The Commons Clause is a license that open source projects can use to protect their code from being profited from. Redis, an open source in-memory object storage system, recently licensed their code with the Commons Clause with the goal of improving the business of Redis Labs, a company built by the creators of the Redis project.

Kevin Wang joins the show to discuss everything open source–from business models to security vulnerabilities to licensing. Kevin is the CEO at FOSSA, a system for managing open source licensing and security. Kevin was involved in the creation of the Commons Clause and has written about it in detail.

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Linux has created much more value for Google than it has for Linus Torvalds. Ruby on Rails has created more value for Airbnb than it has for David Heinemeier Hansson. Successful open source projects create more value than their creators’ capture–and that’s one reason why collections of people on the Internet are often inspired to work together on open source.

When an engineer creates an open source project, and that open source project finds a large audience, that engineer can often build a successful business. SpringSource, Cloudera, and Elastic are examples of massively successful enterprises that were founded by the creators of open source software. But in other cases, the value of an open source project gets largely captured by cloud providers that create a closed source version of the open source project and offer it as a service.

Shaun Connolly has worked in senior strategic roles at software companies such as SpringSource, VMWare, and Hortonworks. Throughout his decades of experience, much of his time has been spent figuring out how to monetize open source projects intelligently. Shaun joins the show to talk about his past experiences building enterprises, as well as modern issues–such as how to compete with major cloud providers. We also discuss the Commons Clause license, a new software license that open source projects can use to try to protect their value from being entirely captured by a cloud provider.

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The DEV Community is a platform where developers share ideas, programming advice, and tools. Ben Halpern started it after running an extremely successful Twitter account creating humorous tweets for developers. One way to describe DEV Community is as a cross between Medium, Stack Overflow, and Reddit–but it has its own personality, so I recommend checking it out.

The DEV Community was open sourced, and we discussed the challenges and the opportunities of having an open source social network. We also talked about his plans for the future, and where he is taking DEV Community.

Ben is an entrepreneur who tries lots of different creative projects, so his perspective has always resonated with me. Ben has been on the show a few times before, when we talked about the state of developer media, side projects, and the identity of the software engineer.

DEV Community was originally called Practical Dev, which I mistakenly referred to it as in the earlier parts of the show.

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Blogging is more than 20 years old. Over that period of time, numerous publishing platforms have been created. Squarespace, Blogger, Medium, and Twitter are popular closed source platforms. WordPress has been the most popular open source blogging platform–and much of the Internet (including Software Engineering Daily) runs on WordPress.

WordPress is a powerful platform. News companies, ecommerce websites, and many other kinds of businesses use WordPress as their central publishing tool. But WordPress has been around for 15 years–and there are some potential conflicts of interest between WordPress the open source project and WordPress.com (a company started to host WordPress websites).

John O’Nolan was working as a WordPress developer when he decided to start a new publishing platform called Ghost. Five years later, the Ghost project is a success–with a thriving open source community, a profitable SaaS business, and companies like Digital Ocean and Mozilla using Ghost to host their blogs.

John and I discussed his background with WordPress, what he wanted to do differently with Ghost, and the software architecture of Ghost. We also touched on the Ghost SaaS business and the management of the open source project.

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Flutter allows developers to build cross-platform mobile apps. In our previous show about Flutter, Eric Seidel from Google described the goals of Flutter, why he founded the project, and how Flutter is built. In today’s show, Randal Schwartz talks about Flutter in more detail–including the developer experience of building Flutter apps and why he finds Flutter so exciting.

Randal is a longtime software developer who has focused mostly on web applications. He’s also the host of the popular podcast FLOSS Weekly, a show about open source software. Like many developers, Randal has stayed away from mobile development in the past. If you write a mobile application, you have historically had to build iOS and Android apps separately. That is a large up-front cost, and Flutter reduces the cost by allowing users to develop mobile apps for iOS and Android with a single codebase.

Randal has been podcasting about open source software for 12 years, so he brings historical depth to this conversation. He has also been working with Dart for several years–Dart is a language developed by Google that is used in Flutter.

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Flutter is a project from Google that is rebuilding user interface engineering from the ground up.

Today, most engineering teams have dedicated engineering resources for web, iOS, and Android. These different platforms have their own design constraints, their own toolset, and their own programming languages. But each platform is merely building a user interface. Why should development across these three user surfaces be so different?

This was the question that Eric Seidel was asking himself three years ago, when he co-founded the Flutter project. The Flutter project had a few rough starts, as the team tried to figure out exactly what layer of abstraction they were trying to provide.

Around that time, ReactJS and React Native were growing in popularity. Seeing the React projects provided some data points, and some inspiration. But Flutter takes a lower level approach to cross platform app development, by presenting a rendering layer and a runtime API that are interfacing with the hardware in the same way that OpenGL does.

In today’s episode, Eric joins the show to explain how the Flutter project came to life, and his lessons from starting an ambitious project that took several years to pick up steam. I enjoyed this episode because Flutter could have massive improvements for how quickly we can build apps–and also because Eric is a serious engineer and there are so many insights in this episode about computer science, software engineering, and project management.

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

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Chromium is an open source browser that shares code with the Chrome browser from Google. A browser is a large piece of software, with engineering challenges around threading, rendering, resource management, and networking. To add to the complexity, Chrome runs on iOS, Android, MacOSX, Windows, and other platforms.

Chrome OS is an operating system based on Chrome. There is also Chromium OS, the open source version of Chrome OS. The Chrome/Chromium operating systems are based off of Linux.

Through this entire episode, the line between browser and operating system is blurry. There is so much resource management involved in the Chrome browser that it has its own task manager. For many people (including myself) the browser is the main application you are interfacing with throughout the day. It handles all of your business applications. Even many of your desktop apps, such as Slack, are running on Electron, which is a framework for building cross-platform apps that uses Chromium.

David Bokan is an engineer on the Chromium team at Google, and he joins the show to describe the engineering of Chrome and the development and release process. David also gives his thoughts on future developments for browsers, apps, and the Internet.

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Different browsers consume JavaScript in different ways.

When a new version of JavaScript comes out, developers are eager to use the new functionality of that language version. But if you are writing frontend JavaScript code, that code needs to be interpretable by every browser that might consume it–whether the consumer is on an iPhone running Safari or a Windows machine running Internet Explorer 11.

Babel is a transpiler for JavaScript. Babel allows new versions of JavaScript to be consumed by older browsers by translating new language features of JavaScript into code that is readable by an older JavaScript interpreter. Babel does this by parsing JavaScript code, creating an abstract syntax tree, and manipulating the AST to make that code comply with the old browser.

Henry Zhu is a core maintainer of Babel and a full-time open source developer. In today’s episode, Henry explains how Babel works and its various applications. He also talks about life as a full-time open source developer, where he earns a living through Patreon and OpenCollective.

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