The Craft Of Open Source

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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.

Released in 2004, Ruby on Rails is an open-source web application framework written in Ruby. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson, the framework takes full advantage of the Ruby’s unique features to create a language that continues to be very approachable even after almost two decades of development. In this conversation with Ben Rometsch, David dives deep into the genesis and evolution of Ruby on Rails and talks about his other works in progress at Basecamp and HEY. He also shares his prophetic and revolutionary insights on licensing, antitrust and other issues that matter to the open-source community.

Universal code search is an awesome tool that can make you a lot more efficient as a coder, but not many developers or companies use it. An open source alternative to Google Code Search, Sourcegraph is on a mission to bring this underappreciated piece of software into every developer and every company that needs it. The company’s CEO, Quinn Slack joins Ben Rometsch on the show to share how Sourcegraph works with former Google developers to replicate some of the amazing features of Google’s internal code search tool that are not offered by most of the competition. He also talks about the initial struggle they had in offering a cloud service, their subsequent shift to self-hosting, and the difficult decision to go partially open source. A coder himself, Quinn believes that once developers start using code search, they wouldn’t be able to live without it again. But first, the challenge is to convince them to use it in the first place.

Companies that have an open source component usually started out as open source and then developed an enterprise version of the software later. Load testing SaaS platform, k6 approached its development the other way around – producing an interesting dynamic that has resulted to unique outcomes for the company. As CEO Robin Gustafsson relates in this conversation with Ben Rometsch, that entry into the relatively unknown territory of open source gave the k6 team a lot to argue about for some years, but it ultimately allowed them to create a business model that benefits from the best of both worlds. Interestingly, the company’s unique path has created a clear delineation between which of its components are open source and which are proprietary. Listen in and pick up some cool lessons from this company’s journey.