The Business of Open Source14 Mai 2025

Open Source Firmware for EV Charging Stations with Marco Möller

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Marco Möller, CEO and co-founder of Pionix. This was a fabulous conversation about a company that’s in a very different market from the usual open source company: They make firmware for EV charging stations, and are behind the EVerest project, which is part of LF Energy.

So who is part of the community open source projects that are so connected to hardware? Here’s what we talked about.

There aren’t many hobbyists in the community — but there are a lot of people who have professional interests in the electric vehicle industry. EVerest doesn’t focus on what Marco considers “personal” or “hobbiest” features. This was a great discussion about how understanding the target market, including for the project, leads to different feature decisions.
How does Pionix money? It doesn’t yet :), but we talked about various plans the company has for monetization in the future.
How being involved with the LF Energy has helped build trust, which is very important for a company that is only going to be selling to large companies and governments.
Why Marco thinks that the huge vision he has for creating firmware for EV charging stations is only possible with open source, and how he makes sure that he’s able to fund the large mission without hurting the community.
The balancing act with getting investors who specialize in the energy market but who don’t have experience with open source

Struggling with positioning your project or figuring out how to best monetize? You might want to work with me.

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

Episoder(275)

From Closed to Open: Shortening Sales Cycles with Stephen Goldberg

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 al...

6 Jul 33min

Does AI Make Open Core Models More Difficult? with Sam Alba

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 ...

2 Jul 39min

Closed to Open Source Series: Doing Open Source "Right" with Ethan Arrowood

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 f...

22 Jun 40min

The Value of Code is Dropping to Zero with Yann Lechelle

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 r...

15 Jun 42min

Why the World Needs the Agentic AI Foundation with Manik Surtani

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...

8 Jun 34min

The AI-Induced Death of A Bug Bounty Program with Glauber Costa

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-w...

1 Jun 43min

Changing Your Price Anchor with Anais Concepcion

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 enterpri...

11 Feb 32min

Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

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 d...

8 Okt 202535min