Matt Yonkovit

Open source maintainers and developers should never feel guilty about building a business around their projects. It is entirely possible to create a thriving open source business without sacrificing your community or your values. In this talk, we will reveal how, by sharing best practices, stories, ideas, and invaluable advice collected over the past seven years from some of the brightest founders, executives, and leaders in the open source space. We will explore the challenges of building and growing an open source business, focusing on the transformation of free users into satisfied paying customers. With insights drawn from 20 years of experience and conversations with hundreds of business executives, maintainers, and product owners, we will discuss the best practices, metrics, and processes that can help drive growth and adoption in the open source space. Join us as we delve into the unique nature of selling open source and how it differs from traditional business models. We will emphasize the importance of differentiating your paid-for offerings from freely available software, and guide you on how to navigate the open source landscape to build a sustainable, scalable, and profitable business around your project – all while fostering a strong community that supports both your commercial and technical objectives.

Though open source maintainers have many different goals, most of those goals depend on growing the project’s usage and community engagement. As projects get larger, they are able to attract new contributors and new funding opportunities, allowing maintainers to fix bugs and add features more quickly. A larger, more engaged community of users also decreases the risk that an open source project will be abandoned, creating a virtuous cycle of trust as more organizations feel comfortable using the project in mission-critical applications. Whether a project is a hobby side project or backed by a Fortune 10 company, growth matters. This half-day workshop is for any maintainer who cares about their projects’ growth, both in terms of number of users and engagement of existing users. Attendees will learn about the strategies and tactics to increase downloads, active user base, project stickiness, and community engagement. Topics we will explore include but are not limited to: Project positioning & messaging Non-slimy marketing techniques Collecting and acting on user feedback DevRel activities and optimization Keeping users happy via support, fixes, and education Tracking and measuring project growth Community management Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for how to accelerate their projects’ growth.

Other people: Emily Omier

If you have a project or a business, how are you measuring growth, adoption, and success? Many companies need help understanding how open source community success translates into commercial success ( or a sustainable business ). The conversion from free open source users to paying customers is a challenging one, but there are some common techniques and practices successful companies deploy. For example: Optimizing your user journey is critical and can make or break your success. Did you know, for instance, some of the best companies can convert users browsing their documentation to those downloading their software at a 5:1 ratio, while others convert at a 500:1 ratio. How do you optimize your journey to enable people to not only easily download your software but use it? During this talk, I will outline the best practices, metrics, and processes you should follow when looking to build or grow your business.

Congrats, you have a community team! Maybe if you are lucky, you have some DevRel folks too! In many companies, the community or DevRel teams are small, impossibly small for the work that needs to be done. If you are like most companies I have talked to, your job in one of these roles is to gain lots and lots of adoption, “Grow the user base,” your boss will tell you. The issue is how does a team of 1 or a handful of people build and support tens of thousands or even potentially millions of users… the answer is you don’t. Rather the goal of most teams should be to support and grow external advocates and evangelists who can do the work for you. Hiring 2 people to tell the world how awesome your software is can only reach so far… but if those 2 people get 1000 people to tell their story that has a massive reach. So how do you build such a system? How do you measure it? I will walk through what I have learned when talking to hundreds of community teams over the last 5 years and share with you what I have seen works and what does not.

The changing landscape of the open-source industry has taken a potentially dark turn in the last few years. Instead of focusing on inclusion, innovation, and collaboration a new generation of so called open source drive companies has emerged flush with investor money and looking to maximize the returns for their investors and shareholders at all costs. In an effort to accelerate “revenue” and “profits” these companies are looking to rewrite the definition of what they consider open source. We are in a battle for not only the hearts and minds of the FOSS community but our collective future. As new developers start open source projects more will be compelled to choose more restrictive licensing models ( i.e. SSPL ), invest less in the community, and “control” as much of the code and product as possible. I will talk about the trend, talk about the common business models, and offer a few alternatives.

2020 was a very bad year for most of us, under the shadow of all that was going on there was a troubling trend we all need to be aware of: the erosion of the classic open source model and values. For years vendors have been slowly chipping away at the freedom and openness provided by open source, this year saw unprecedented changes to how people view and value OSS. From licensing changes to as a service exclusive, what was open is no longer. Is this being driven solely by the cloud? or is this purely corporate greed and others viewing open Source as a successful business model to replicate? Let's not only discuss but bring to light the trouble trends that threaten open source projects and development as we know it.

"[W]e didn't open source it to get help from the community, to make the product better. We open sourced as a freemium strategy; to drive adoption." - MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria

Open source was never designed or planned to be used as "Gateway Drug" to move people to a proprietary locked in software, but more and more this is happening. This is not just a MongoDB move; Elastic, Redis, and others have all used the "Cloud" as a convenient excuse to erode classic open source licenses and values. At the same time new "open source compatible" versions of popular projects like MySQL or PostgreSQL pop up on cloud providers platforms. It's like the game "Among Us" only with your open source projects. You never know who or what is really open until you dig deep.