The truth about open source businesses: Confessions from an ex-open sourceror
From the outside, open source companies try to appear to be Fine Upstanding Open Source Citizens. On the inside of the sausage factory, however, hard decisions and trade-offs are constantly being made. After nearly 15 years of working for some of the industry's best-known open source companies, Matt Asay decided to move on. He explains why and what he learned along the way.
| Talk Title | The truth about open source businesses: Confessions from an ex-open sourceror |
| Speakers | Matt Asay (AWS) |
| Conference | O’Reilly Open Source Convention |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | Austin, Texas |
| Date | May 16-19, 2016 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
From the outside, open source companies try to appear to be Fine Upstanding Open Source Citizens™. On the inside of the sausage factory, however, hard decisions and trade-offs are constantly being made. After nearly 15 years of working for some of the industry’s best-known open source companies, including MongoDB and Canonical, Matt Asay decided to go to work for a company that uses and contributes to open source communities but doesn’t rely on them for revenue. Matt describes the fundamental struggles every open source business has and explores how different companies have dealt with them (e.g., which features will be open vs. closed, which license to use, etc.). Matt also details why he decided to move on and why maybe you should consider doing so too.
