The New Stack Podcast19 Jul 2022

Open Technology, Financial Sustainability and the Importance of Community

In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Amanda Brock, CEO and founder of OpenUK, talked with The New Stack about revenue models for open source and how those fit into building a sustainable project.

Funding an open source project has to be part of the sustainability question — open source requires humans to contribute, and those humans have bills to pay and risk burnout if the open source project is a side gig after their full time job. That’s not the only expenses a project might accrue, either — there might be cloud costs, for example. Brock says there are essentially eight categories of funding models for open source, of which really two or three have been proven successful. They are support, subscription and open core.

So how do we define open core, exactly? “You get different kinds of open core businesses, one that is driven very much by the needs of the company, and one that is driven by the needs of the open source project and community,” Brock said. In other words, sometimes the project exists to drive revenue, sometime the revenue exists to support the project — a subtle distinction, but it’s easy to see how one or the other orientation could change a company’s relationship with open source.

Are both types really open source? For Brock, it all comes down to community. “It’s the companies that have proper community that are really open source to me,” she said. “That’s where you’ve got a proper project with a real community, the community is not entirely based off of your employees.”

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(300)

Bit Cloud’s next chapter starts after the AI builds your app

For many developers, turning an AI-generated prototype into maintainable software requires more than generating code—it requires infrastructure, collaboration, testing and review. In this episode of T...

1 Okt 31min

CloudBees just committed to an AI-first pivot. Here's why it matters for enterprise DevOps teams

CloudBees CEO Mo Plassnig is leading the CI/CD company through a major transformation as generative AI reshapes software development. Returning to CloudBees eight years after joining through its acqui...

30 Sep 23min

A third option is emerging in the fight over AI and your data

The AI industry has faced a growing enterprise dilemma: companies want access to powerful proprietary AI models without risking sensitive data or intellectual property, while AI labs want to protect t...

23 Sep 30min

Drowning in AI pull requests: Harness's field CTO on code review and a Git repo built for agents

Harness Field CTO Martin Reynolds joins The New Stack to talk about what happens after coding agents start opening pull requests faster than anyone can review them. He explains how he first saw the bo...

7 Sep 26min

How to find failures without drowning in tracing data

Traces provide a detailed view of a request’s journey through data, microservices and applications, helping SREs pinpoint where failures occur and resolve issues faster. But while tracing can reduce d...

3 Sep 31min

Why CPUs still matter in the age of AI agents

As AI evolves from conversational chatbots to autonomous agents, CPUs are becoming an increasingly important part of the infrastructure equation. In this episode, The New Stack speaks with Bhumik Pate...

11 Aug 26min

Why Doist Says Less AI Can Deliver More

Doist CTO Gonçalo Silva says AI is reshaping software development, but success depends on restraint rather than rapid feature expansion. Instead of chasing every AI capability, Doist prioritizes “subt...

31 Jul 35min

Why your company should (try to) build its own AI SRE

As AI coding agents accelerate software development, they also create new challenges for site reliability engineers (SREs), who are increasingly responsible for debugging systems that no single human ...

30 Jul 30min