A Massive Head Start on Product Development with Open Source with Martin Mao

The Business of Open Source

This special episode recorded live at KubeCon Salt Lake City last November is with Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder at Chronosphere.

We talked about how M3 was foundational to the early history of Chronosphere, and how the ability to leverage M3, which Martin and his co-founder had written while they were still working at Uber. One of the most important aspects of this story is that since M3 is the foundation Chronosphere is built on, the fact that it was developed over four years at Uber while they were still on Uber’s payroll meant that when they decided to build a company it allowed them to get to market dramatically faster than would have been possible otherwise.

Chronosphere’s core platform is a proprietary SaaS product, but still has a significant relationship with two other projects: Perses, which was developed at Chronosphere and donated to the CNCF in 2024; and FluentBit, a CNCF graduated project that was originally developed by Calyptia and became part of Chronosphere when it acquired Calyptia.

We talked about:

• The pros and cons of donating projects to the CNCF, from both the perspectives of the company creating the project and the interests of the community and project itself
• Why Chronosphere’s core platform isn’t open source itself
• How a company can end up getting financial advantages from being the stewards of large open source community, even if the connection doesn’t always seem obvious
• How product roadmaps are managed for the two projects versus how it’s managed for Chronosphere’s proprietary products.

If you’re building a company around an open source project and aren’t sure how to manage the relationship between the project and product, you might want to work with me or come to Open Source Founders Summit this May.