The Craft Of Open Source
Ben Rometsch, CEO, Flagsmith
Welcome to The Craft of Open Source, hosted by Ben Rometsch, Co-Founder and CEO of Flagsmith. This bi-weekly show is focused on the ins and outs of the Open Source Software Community. Join Ben as he speaks with the brightest minds that have brought us some of the most adopted technologies on earth. Each episode is an interview with creators, maintainers, entrepreneurs, and key contributors to the open source community. We will cover critical topics for open source developers, contributors and entrepreneurs such as: Which open source licenses are best if you want to start a business at some point? How did people start their projects? What was the first commit? Did people start their projects for business or a different reason? How can you build an organic community around new projects? How can you create a business and still be open source? Where is open source headed? The technologies that we plan to profile will range from huge projects like React.js, Ansible, Git, PHP, Kafka, GitHub, Java, Python, Javascript, Redis, Kubernetes, VisualStudio, TensorFlow, Android, Apache, Spinnaker, Azure, and many more. The types of licenses that we plan to profile will include: GNU General Public License (GPL), The Apache License, Microsoft Public License (Ms-Pl), Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), Eclipse Public License (EPL), and MIT License.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Aug 17, 2021 • 45min
Sebastien Lorber, Docusaurus
Docusaurus lead developer Sebastien Lorber has some interesting insights to share. As a freelance contractor, Sebastien leads the development of the Docusaurus open-source project for Facebook. Docusaurus is a static site generator that generates a modern single-page application from Markdown files so that website creators can focus on creating their content.
Aug 3, 2021 • 46min
Pablo Múzquiz, Penpot
Pablo Múzquiz, CEO & co-founder of Penpot. Penpot gives design freedom for teams. In this episode, Pablo takes Ben Rometsch behind the scenes on how they came up with Penpot. Join in the conversation and discover Penpot’s groundbreaking potential for designers.
Jul 13, 2021 • 35min
Harsha, Co-Founder @ MinIO (min.io)
MinIO is the #1 cloud-native open-source object store for enterprises. In this episode, Ben caught up with Harshavardhana, the co-founder of MinIO.
Jun 29, 2021 • 46min
The Founding Story of Jenkins (@jenkinsci) with the creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Ben Rometsch (getflagsmith)
The open-source community was changed forever with the Jenkins software project. Providing hundreds of plugins to be used for project building, deployment, and automation, it is the leading open-source automation server today. To explore this even further, Ben Rometsch goes back to the beginning by sitting down with its creator, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. He tells the story of how he was motivated to design such an open-source project, how it was conceptualized, and the silly origins of its name. The two also discuss their thoughts about software concepts that start with a commercial version only for someone to build its open-source counterpart. Kohsuke also shares his current life at Launchable, particularly about his mission to connect the Japanese tech scene to the western world.
Jun 15, 2021 • 40min
Bjarne Christiansen, Co-Founder @ Realm
Open source is an ever-evolving field since technological innovation and demands will not stop as human life progresses, finding a useful open-source alternative to existing projects. This way, the work of a developer can be easier depending on the purpose they are after. Ben Rometsch talks with Bjarne Christiansen to discuss the journey of how he built Realm, which offers a mobile database that is not only developer-friendly but also a useful alternative to SQLite and CoreData. He also shares how his partnerships with MongoDB and Firebase worked for him, as well as the company’s plans to transcend into the realm of the Internet of Things.
Jun 1, 2021 • 40min
Kasra Bigdeli, CapRover
One of the most important features of an open-source project is its high level of user-friendliness. Even if one has various complexities that allow for better application development or webserver management, something that's confusing and time-consuming will not be used as much by many. This is what Kasra Bigdeli had in mind when he started CapRover. He joins Ben Rometsch to share how this simple side hustle grew into an organized company, all to provide the most practical solutions to the biggest open-source projects and issues. Kasra also talks about how he addresses the never-ending requests and feedback from clients, how he chooses licenses for his projects, and which tools he uses to make his work much easier than usual.
May 25, 2021 • 47min
OSS Capital's Vision for the Future of Open Source Software with JJ Jacks (@asynchio) and Ben Rometsch (getflagsmith)
In this episode, Ben Rometsch helps unravel this category by sitting down with Joseph Jacks of OSS Capital to learn more about what the funding ecosystem looks like for commercial open source companies. JJ is a huge COSS supporter and shares why he thinks this is the best time to be building a company in this space.
May 18, 2021 • 41min
Mattermost's (@Mattermost) journey from open source to commercial success with Co-Founder and CEO Ian Tien (@iantien) and Ben Rometsch (@getflagsmith)
In this episode, Ben Rometsch interviews Ian Tien, the CEO and co-founder of Mattermost, which has been referred to as the open-source alternative for Slack. Ian shares their genesis story in gaming, the challenges they encountered with scaling a messaging company, the applications they find useful, and more.
May 4, 2021 • 48min
Nic Hourcard, Co-Founder of QuestDB
Nicolas Hourcard saw this need for a high performance time-series database and decided to co-found QuestDB. In this episode, he joins Ben Rometsch to share the genesis of this project and the problems they are trying to fix with the technology.
Apr 13, 2021 • 37min
Torkel Ödegaard, Grafana Creator & Project Lead
Looking for observability dashboards that have the right balance between looking good, easy to use, powerful, and intuitive? Ben Rometsch has a web application just for you. In this episode, he sits down with the creator and project lead of Grafana, Torkel Ödegaard, to talk about how he started this company that offers a monitoring observability solution built on open-source components. He takes us inside into the work they put into creating a great user interface as well as the behind-the-scenes of meeting co-founders, finding the people to finance the deals, and scaling. Talking to others thinking of building a monitoring and observability company, Torkel then shares some advice on how to navigate the open-source industry and more.
