Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Avi Press (@avi_press) about Scarf, the distribution platform for open-source software that facilitates analytics and commercialization. Scarf offers a set of tools that allows founders and maintainers to understand adoption of their products, including Scarf Gateway, which provides a central access point to containers and packages. From there, open-source developers can connect with the people that rely on their work.

In this episode we discuss:

• Why you can’t rely on Github as a source of comprehensive data about open-source software
• Tracing a user’s journey interacting with a project across multiple platforms
• How better observability allows maintainers to make better software
• Inspiring indie maintainers to commercialize their projects
• The privilege of being able to work in open-source, and how Scarf can enable a more inclusive developer community

Links:

• Scarf
• Tidelift
• Gitcoin
• OpenTeams
• Aviyel