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PODCAST

The Business of Open Source

Whether you"re a founder of an open source startup, an open source maintainer or just an open source enthusiast, join host Emily Omier as she talks to the people who work at the intersection of open source and business, from startup founders to leaders of open source giants and all the people who help open source startups grow.

technology entrepreneurship

All Episodes

40:42

Closed to Open Source Series: Doing Open Source...

The Business of Open Source ·

2026/06/22

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

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42:56

The Value of Code is Dropping to Zero with Yann Lechelle

The Business of Open Source ·

2026/06/15

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

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34:10

Why the World Needs the Agentic AI Foundation with...

The Business of Open Source ·

2026/06/08

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

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43:33

The AI-Induced Death of A Bug Bounty Program with...

The Business of Open Source ·

2026/06/01

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

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32:33

Changing Your Price Anchor with Anais Concepcion

The Business of Open Source ·

2026/02/11

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

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35:27

Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/10/08

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

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34:54

Go-To-Market for Open Source Companies with Quentin...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/09/24

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Quentin Sinig, who has been the first “business” hire at three open source companies; Strapi, Kestra and now Pruna.ai. We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, which was especially interesting because it spanned three open source companies so we were able to talk about patterns Quentin saw at all of them, as well as how the ecosystem is changing now. We talked about the need to find product-market fit, particularly in the AI era

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37:02

Open Foundations with Or Weis

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/09/17

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke to Or Weis, the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io. Or is a serial entrepreneur who has had a long career in developer tools. We talked about Permit’s relationship with open source, including of course the open source projects that they create and maintain. One thing to note is that none of Permit’s open source projects are branded as “Permit.” They are all separate from the permit.io brand. On the other hand, Or talked about the essential

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34:27

Straddling open source software and the hardware...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/09/10

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Rob Taylor, CTO/CSO and founder of ChipFlow. Although ChipFlow is unambiguously a software company, it creates software that facilitate the creation of semiconductors, so it straddles the software and hardware worlds.Some of the things we talked about include: The state of open source in the semiconductor space, and why that matters. A large part of it is the high cost of proprietary software for chip design, and the fact that there are

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39:12

The double-edged sword of big initial customers with...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/09/03

This week I’m back from vacation and I have a new episode of The Business of Open Source, with Taco Potze! Taco is the co-founder and CEO of Open Social. A couple interesting takeaways from our conversation: When you’re transitioning from a services company to a product company, it’s much easier if the product you work on is connected to the services your clients are already paying for. Landing a huge customer, particularly if it’s your first customer, can be a double-edged sword. On the

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39:31

Build for Dual Audiences with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/07/02

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz, CEO and co-founder of Penpot. We started out by talking about the transition from services company to product company, how they decided to pivot to building a product company and when they made the decision to go all-in on the product. Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation is the discussion of the business model. It’s almost like open core in reverse. Penpot open source is fully featured and very

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36:23

Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/06/25

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked with Alya Abbott, COO of Zulip, about managing community contributors. This is a hot topic for open source companies — and for that matter, open source projects in general, including those that aren’t being monetized in any way. It’s a bit of a third rail in the open source ecosystem to suggest that there’s a downside to community contributions, but there undoubtably is. At Zulip, they think about the contribution process as a product. They

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36:17

Building a Dual Growth Flywheel at GitLab with Nick...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/06/18

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nick Veenhof, Director of Contributor Success at GitLab. GitLab has probably the most well-articulated open source strategy out there, and we talked about the two main prongs of that strategy, the co-create strategy and the dual flywheel strategy. We also talked about incentivizing individuals versus incentivizing companies and how to build recognition system as part of the way to encourage people to contribute. We also talked about how

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45:47

Solving Universal, Persistant Problems with David...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/06/11

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Aronchick, CEO and founder of Expanso, about luck and timing, building into universal truths and the reasons for Kubernetes’ success. Before David founded Expanso (which is behind the project Bacalhau), he was the first non-founding PM on the Kubernetes project, and we kicked off by talking a bit about what made Kubernetes so successful… and you probably can guess that it didn’t have to do with having the most awesome technology

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35:31

David and Goliath in the CMS Market with Thomas Schedler

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/05/28

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Thomas Schedler, co-founder and CEO of Sulu. Sulu is a small, bootstrapped company that spun out of an agency; Thomas was recommended by someone to me as a guest, but when I first reached out to him he was skeptical about coming on the show because he wasn’t sure he was a good fit. But there’s a bunch to learn from this episode! Spinning out from an agency —> in my experience, one of the most common ways for open source companies to

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33:57

Open Source Firmware for EV Charging Stations with...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/05/14

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

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35:50

AI-generated Code Copied from Open Source with Julian...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/05/07

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Julian Coccia, CTO of ScanOSS, about selling access to data while making open source software. Of course, we also talked about being an open source company that is also deep in the open source world, helping companies understand their reliance on open source code and how open source is used in their codebase. Several things that we talked about: AI and open source code. This is a topic that’s slightly tangential to business, but very

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40:25

How to be Successful when Donating a Project to the...

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/04/30

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, which is now part of Cisco. We addressed two subjects: How to be successful as a company that donates their project to the CNCF, and the story of Isovalent’s acquisition by Cisco and the role open source played in that acquisition. We talked about: Trademarks. This is a very important part of what you donate when you donate a project to the CNCF (or other foundations). We talked about what

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39:44

Open Source Manifestos with Vincent Untz

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/04/02

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked about Open Source Manifestos with Vincent Untz, CTO of Centreon. The entire conversation focused on this idea of open source manifestos, which Vincent is going to talk about at Open Source Founders Summit — and I had never heard of before. The idea to create an open source manifesto came about because internally there was a lot of frustration around Centreon’s relationship with open source. A lot of people, especially those who didn’t come

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42:02

How a Rebrand Increased Sales with Lukas Gentele

The Business of Open Source ·

2025/03/26

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Lukas Gentele, the CEO and co-founder of LoftLabs. Here’s some of the things we covered: There are many open source projects at LoftLabs. We talked about what the team did differently the second time round, when they’d had the experience of creating the first project under their belt, and why they continued creating additional projects after that. How they make roadmap decisions to decide what goes in the OSS versus what goes in the

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273 results

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