This week on The Business of Open Source, I talk with Julien Verlaguet, the CEO of Skiplabs. Julien is a programming language guy, and we talked about what it means to maintain an open source programming language. 

We talked about what it means to monetize a a programming language… or, as Julien says, you do not. So why does maintaining SKIP pay off for the team at Skiplabs? And how exactly do they make money? 

Skiplabs builds products using SKIP, and they focus on building products that can and do take full advantage of the programming language. But ultimately, do customers care that the products are built by the language maintainers? Probably not. 

“If your open source project can’t be directly monetized with a SaaS,” Julien said. “You have to get a bit more creative.” 

Indeed, how do you get creative? I have to agree with Julien, that it really depends on what you’re working on. When you think about how to monetize, it’s important to think about what exactly your customers want. 

He talked about the importance of doing interviews with your target market. In fact, he recommends doing two or three interviews with people in your target market, and in the first interview you don’t even talk about your product ideas, but rather listen to them talk about their problems and how they solve them or would like to solve them. 

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By the way, did you know that one of the services I offer is interviewing your customers? Julien talks about how people can overstate how good your product is during interviews… this is true, and having an outside person do the interviews is one of the ways around this. If you’d like someone to interview people in your target market, including users and customers, and to help you use that information to get to product-market fit faster, reach out. 

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Joshua Drake, president and CTO of Command Prompt, about business management, bootstrapping versus taking investment, and AI, open source and open source businesses. 

This episode is a real no-bullshit take on how human psychology influences how leaders behave, how people identify with open source ecosystems and specific technology, and how people in open source should focus more on the outcomes that they want to achieve for clients or for their company rather than making their identity about being an open source developer or a postgres developer.

He says everyone — not just entrepreneurs, but technologists in open source communities in general — need to focus on outcomes and build their identities around those outcomes, rather than around a specific technology. This goes for people whose identities are completely connected to open source. What’s important, that the license is OSI-approved, or that you are a person who builds software collaboratively? What’s important, is it the lines of code or is it the people in the community? 

This episode has a lot of gems; it will be useful for seasoned entrepreneurs as well as aspiring ones. 

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If you’re listening to this and you want to go deeper on the human side of building open source companies, check out Open Source Founders Summit, a conference dedicated to building open source companies. 

As a consultant, I’m also focused on outcomes for clients rather than hours in a chair. What are the outcomes I get? A streamlined product roadmap that’s focused on what matters to your ideal customers, higher conversion rates from your sales conversations and shorter sales cycles. Find out more about working with me here. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I chatted with Stephen Goldberg, co-founder of Harper, about the process of taking Harper from a closed-source software company to a open source company. I already talked to Ethan Arrowood about the transition to open source, but Stephen was able to give a founders perspective about why Harper wanted to move to open source, why it wasn’t launched as an open source company from the very beginning and why they choose the moment in question to go open source. 

He says that 80 to 90% of the effort around taking a big piece of Harper open source was around communication, both external and internal. It’s not that difficult to change an license or to push something onto GitHub, but a successful open source launch is about so much more than that. 

Here’s what we talked about: 

• The board pushed back a lot, mostly because they felt like going open source was going to complicate things for the company and they were worried that the risks outweighed the benefits
• Stephen was convinced that even as a closed-source company, their customers weren’t paying for their code, but rather for their services. Harper also sells to large enterprises, and he was convinced this type of customer doesn’t want to cowboy their tech stack. 
• There has been a massive positive impact on the company’s sales cycles. The sales cycles are shorter and require less effort from Harper’s team; it’s also psychologically easier when someone asks him to prove that the product does what he promises — he just has to ask tell them to verify for themselves. 
• They haven’t gotten many outside contributions and that was never the goal, but they do get bug reports. This has significantly reduced their costs of support, because the bug reports are often very detailed and identify where in the code there is a problem. Not only that: customers are able to figure out when the “bug” is actually a problem on their side, and that reduces support volume considerably. 
• AI coding agents have dramatically increased the value of an open source project, because when the agent is able to see the software’s code directly, it’s able to build on top of it and integrate it into the system but more effectively than if it were working with docs. This was a huge win that they didn’t expect. 

The bottom line: If you understand your business model, going open source has a lot of upsides and the risks are not as scary as you think. However, getting advice along the way is critical, and you should work with people who understand open source companies if you’re going open source.

If you're considering going from closed to open source and you'd like help on the product strategy and the communication part... that's what I do. You might consider working with me. 

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Sam Alba, co-founder of Mendral, formerly of Dagger, and the first hire at Docker. We talked a lot about about how AI is changing the developer tools marketplace. If AI is changing the way software is developed, what does that mean for the companies that previously had made tools for developers? 

We talked a lot about hype; what is hype and what is not hype? How many people are actually using AI and getting value from it. 

It’s hard to differentiate between the hype and real value, Alba says, but also that while it does seem like AI is a bubble, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing real there. It’s just hard to see where the difference is now, but after the bubble bursts there will still be plenty of changes that stick around. 

When it comes to building an open source company — which Mendral is not, by the way, Alba talks about how you have to get product-market fit twice. But for AI is absolutely changing things, and there have been companies that are abandoning open source because the game is changing so much and it is harder to make it work. 

Listen to the entire podcast! And if you want someone to work with on establishing your message and then sharing that message in as many places as possible, get in touch. 

One of the myths that swirl around the open source company ecosystem is that all open source companies started as an open source project that then suddenly got traction, and followed by the founders frantically throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure out a business model. 

In fact, this is not the story of how all open source companies came to exist. 

It is not at all uncommon for a company to start the open source project with the explicit goal of building a company around it, and it also isn’t uncommon for a company that started as a closed source company to open source a portion of their codebase, for a variety of reasons. 

This episode is about that second scenario. It’s the first in a series about how Harper went from a closed-source company to an open source company, including both the why and the how of the transition. 

Today I talked with Ethan Arrowood, head of open source engineering at Harper. We’ll get his perspective on the transition from closed to open source today, and another perspective next time. 

We talked about things like why Harper wasn’t open source from the very beginning, how Harper doesn’t fit the stereotype of an open source company in that they started with enterprise adoption, not individual developers using the platform, and the decision to go open source went hand in hand with the desire to focus on community building. We also had a conversation about the difference between being open source in name and really following the spirit of open source, and why there are business benefits to doing open source ‘right.’ 

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Yann Lechelle, Executive President of :Probabl.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation was about whether or not there is a risk from generative AI being trained on open source code, then generating new open source code and then re-training itself on that code. Yann says that there is already enough code in the world to give AI enough source material to work with, at least when it comes to ‘traditional’ code. So while perhaps there are issues with types of code that really require creativity, in most contexts we don’t need any more human-written code. 

Does this mean the value of code is dropping to zero? That’s what Yann things… but for open source companies with permissive licenses, the value of code was already zero. This means that what really matters is community and brand. 

What do you think? Do you think generative AI makes the value of code close to zero, and puts all software companies in the same boat as open source projects with permissive licenses? If you have an interesting take, let me know.

And if you want someone to help you focus your positioning and streamline your product and marketing strategy, reach out. 

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Manik Surtani, one of the co-founders of the Agentic AI Foundation and the CTO at the foundation. This is part of the series I’m working on about open source and AI, which started last week with a conversation with Glauber Costa about how AI killed a bug bounty program. 

Manik talks about how the foundation came into existence, why it’s important to have a foundation that’s specific to agentic AI and what it means, in terms of everyday activities, to be the CTO of an open source foundation. 

Given how fast everything is moving in the AI space, and specifically around what open source actually means, how we define what is and is not open source, where we can get data and who is able to have data that is open enough to be considered open source. 

And if we want to mitigate the environmental impact of AI, is the solution really to insist on fewer cat videos? 

However, if you like this show and want more content about the intersection of open source, AI and bottom lines, you should consider sponsoring! Reach out if you’re interested. 

The Business of Open Source is back! I’m starting a series about AI and open source this week. 

I reached out to Glauber Costa, founder of Turso, after reading a post of his on LinkedIn about how bot-written PRs for their bug bounty program forced them to discontinue the program completely. In this episode, he talked about the bug bounty program — how it started, who contributed to it initially, why he considered it a huge success. And then he talks about what started happening when bots entered the picture. 

He also talked about the difference between an open source project that accepts contributions and one that doesn’t, about the difference between an open source project and software that’s in the public domain, and how people in open source used to be seen as weirdos who hate money. 

Glauber isn’t an AI hater — he talks about how they use AI at Turso, and how he has no problem with AI-assisted pull requests. The issue is when the result isn’t high-quality. There's also a difference between AI-assisted and 100% bot written. Then it creates essentially a denial of service attack on the community, because the maintainers end up having to spend so much time responding to bot-created PRs. 

What’s your experience with AI and Open Source? Who else should I talk to? Let me know. 

Do you like The Business of Open Source? Help it to continue to exist by sponsoring the podcast.

Does your company have a positioning problem? Work with me to better position your product and see your growth take off. 

There’s a new episode of The Business of Open Source today! It’s been a while. 

I talked with Anais Concepcion about a program she’s been testing at Grist to give free activation codes for the enterprise version of Grist to individuals and small businesses that have a revenue under $1 million. The program has been in place for 5 months, and Anais came on the show to talk about both the strategy behind the program as well as some preliminary results. 

The strategy comes down to shifting the perception of Grist Open Source and Grist Enterprise. The goal, Anais says, is to make the ecosystem consider Grist Enterprise the ‘default’ version of Grist, rather than the other way around. In fact, she’s considering renaming Grist Enterprise to just “Grist” to reinforce the idea that it is not the ‘special’ version of Grist, but the default version. 

There were other strategic goals, too. One is to get more feedback on the ‘enterprise’ features, another is to avoid nickel-and-diming individual users while making sure that big companies are paying. 

The results so far have been interesting. The biggest concrete result has been in partnership relationships; it’s easier for small consulting / development shops to get access to the full Grist and to then resell it to their clients. There haven’t been been any signed deals yet as a result of this dynamic, but there are companies in discussions with the Grist sales team that probably wouldn’t have happened without the program… it will be interesting to see what happens as the program matures. 

After we turned off the recording, we had an interesting discussion about pricing as well; at Open Source Founders Summit Anais is going to do a workshop on pricing strategy. Not how much to charge, but what to charge for (consumption, seats, etc), how to set pricing anchors, and more. Join us in May if that’s interesting to you! 

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.