Exploring open source in business

The growth of open source methodology as a successful process for software development, content creation, and hardware engineering is one of the best technological stories of the 21st Century. Merging those creative processes successfully with business practices has, at times, proven to be challenging, but by no means impossible.

The Open Source in Business webinar series intends to bridge this gap by providing a vendor-neutral forum to discuss the business of open source. The series will examine companies who release software as open source and make money by using that software, rather than by selling it. Participants will hear from services companies that have grown organically by specializing in support and solutions around niche open source projects. Sessions will explore how successful consortia help define and grow a marketplace around popular open source projects. Venture capital partners will share what they look for in successful high-growth businesses, and how open source can play a role in those companies.

Join us for interactive sessions and discussions that explore the inflection point between open source and business, and discover how success in open source business happens.

Season 1: Fall 2020

Find more details about our season 1 topics, and links to the individual videos, in our schedule page.

Episode 1: The Delicate Art of Open Source Product Management

Featured speakers: Adam Jacob, Scott McCarty

Adam Jacob and Scott McCarty join host Dave Neary to talk over the finer points of product management when building commercial products with open source dependencies.

Episode 2: Open Source and Convenience in the Era of Software as a Service

Featured speaker: Stephen O’Grady

Host Dave Neary talks to industry analyst Stephen O’Grady about how open source software vendors can compete effectively against large cloud vendors who offer their projects as a hosted service.

Episode 3: The Labor Economics of Open Source

Featured speakers: Dirk Riehle, Alyssa Wright

Professor Dirk Riehle and Alyssa Wright of Open Collective talk through some of the labor market implications of open source - how to get a job working on open source, and how to make a living wage working on an open source project you created.

Episode 4: The Evolution of Open Source Non-Profits

Featured speakers: Karen Sandler, Myrle Krantz
Featured host: Stephen Walli

Guest host Stephen Walli examines the evolution in the role that open source non-profits have played in the curation of community projects over the past 20 years with Myrle Kranz of the Apache Foundation and Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Episode 5: How Mozilla Changed the Internet

Featured speaker: John Lilly

Former CEO of Mozilla Corporation John Lilly joins host Dave Neary to revisit the early success of the Mozilla Corporation in bringing open source to the mass market consumer, and in revitalizing the Internet at a time when very little innovation was happening.

Episode 6: Bootstrapping a Self-funded Open Source Company

Featured speakers: Alison Gianotto, Roberto Galoppini

Alison Gianotto, CEO and Founder of Grokability, and Roberto Galoppini, Director of Business Strategy for Filezilla, explore the ways they have organically grown their self-funded, bootstrapped companies based on successful open source projects.

Episode 7: Consulting on Open Source Strategy

Featured speakers: Sumana Harihareswara, Aaron Williamson, James Vasile
Featured host: Leslie Hawthorn

Guest host Leslie Hawthorn talks to three experienced open source strategy consultants, Sumana Harihareswara, Aaron Williamson, and James Vasile, on how they help large companies adopt and adapt to open source software development.

Episode 8: The Reinvention of the Eclipse Foundation

Featured speaker: Mike Milinkovich
Featured host: Stephen Walli

The Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, Mike Milinkovich, chats to guest host Stephen Walli, about the evolution of the Eclipse Foundation from its creation 15 years ago as the steward of the Eclipse IDE and platform, through the emergence of IOT and a broader Java ecosystem underthe Foundation umbrella, to its recently announced move to Europe.

Episode 9: Why I won’t start a company around Envoy

Featured speaker: Matt Klein
Featured host: Matt Asay

Guest host Matt Asay joins regular host Dave Neary to talk to Matt Klein, the creator of the Envoy project, about his conscious decision not to start a company around the project when it became popular, and to instead maintain its vendor independence.

Episode 10: Open Source Hardware

Featured speakers: Alicia Gibb, Limor Fried, Jason Kridner

Alicia Gibb, the Executive Director of the Open Source Hardware Association, CEO of AdaFruit Limor Fried, and Jason Kridner, the co-founder of the BeagleBoard Project, join host Dave Neary to explain the emergence and growth of the Open Hardware ecosystem.

All of our past episodes are listed on the event schedule page, and are also available on our YouTube channel.