The Complicated Calculus around Donating a Project to a Foundation with Omri Gazette

The Business of Open Source

In the last episode of The Business of Open Source recorded at KubeCon Salt Lake City, I spoke with Omri Gazitt, co-founder and CEO of Aserto.

Aserto has two open source project that it maintains, one of which it donated to the CNCF. In this episode, we talked about the decision to donate a project to the CNCF — both what the process entailed and what is in for Aserto in having a project at the CNCF.

But of course Aserto also has another project, Topaz, which it has not donated to the CNCF. We also talked about why Topaz wasn’t donated to the CNCF.

A couple things to pull out of this conversation:

• The complicated calculus of deciding whether to donate a project to a foundation, and how the dynamics of the market change over the years and you have to think very critically about the specifics of your situation before making the decision to donate to a foundation
• How every company has slightly different market pressures — sometimes the market pushed you to donate to a foundation, sometimes the market doesn’t care.
• The importance of thinking not just about market share when you’re open source, but also how you are going to monetize! It’s possible to have vastly smaller market share but make vastly more money.
• Why being an open source company does not have to mean that your paid solution has to be cheaper than your competitors.
• Why you don’t have to start selling into startups — sometimes your best customers will always be either mid-market or enterprise from the very beginning.

We talked about the panel I moderated at CloudNative StartupFest at KubeCon. If you missed it, here’s the link to see the replay. We also talked about Adam Jacob’s talk at the same event, which you can see here.

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.