The Craft Of Open Source

There is an ethical conundrum that revolves around the issue of data privacy when it comes to web analytics. Most marketers and businesses, especially the smaller ones, are naturally inclined to use Google Analytics because it offers high functionality for free. However, it does come with the price of data privacy and governments and other stakeholders are increasingly becoming aware of it. Maciej Zawadziński was among the people at the forefront of the development of Piwik (now Matomo), an open source alternative to Google Analytics that focuses on privacy. In 2013, Maciej co-launched Piwik PRO to offer support and consulting for users of the open source Piwik platform that weren't able to get the enterprise features they needed. In 2016, Piwik PRO went independent and shifted its focus on developing an enterprise version of its web analytics software. Together with his COO Piotr Korzeniowski, Maciej joins Ben Rometsch to talk about the company’s genesis, core philosophy and future direction.

Co-Founder and CTO of Sentry, David Cramer joins Ben Rometsch on this episode to talk about his journey from a side project of 70 lines of open source code to the most widely adopted open source crash reporting platform in the world.

Legal systems for almost any industry tends to follow innovation. In open source, that lag has been even more pronounced due to the pace of change and increased complexity. OSS Capital founder, Heather Meeker, has followed the evolution of open source licensing over the course of her 25 year legal career. Sitting down with host Ben Rometsch in this episode, she describes how the legal community is coping with the ever increasing complexities and shares her opinion on the role of legal going forward. This is an extremely informative and insightful conversation for anyone that is thinking about software licensing and how to strike the right balance with the community. Check it out!

Transitioning from a closed source project to open source has its own challenges. Shedding light into the process, Ben Rometsch invites Tom Moor, the founder of Outline. Outline is becoming a widely adopted knowledge-base for leading companies around the world. It has grown incredibly fast with over 10,000 stars on Github and poised to continue it's growth with recent major products in this space being sunset. Together, they talk about Tom’s journey into starting his company as a side project, choosing the right software license and the associated risk of cutting off marketing share, and figuring out a way to build a business from the community.

Ansible was created to make automating IT infrastructure simple. In this episode, we are joined by Michael DeHaan, founder of Ansible, to take us through a wide-ranging conversation. He talks about his beginnings in the open-source community at Redhat, why he started Ansible as a side project and his thoughts on the open-source community's state. Technologies Discussed: Ansible, Redhat, VMWare, IBM, Virtualization, DNS Management, Up To Date, Chef, Puppet, Configuration Tools, Open Source, SSH, Cisco, YAML, Automation, CI/CD, GitHub, Agile, Kubernetes, Cobbler, Linux, React Native, Source Code

Uku and Marko are the Co-Founders of Plausible...and they've never actually met in person. Plausible is an open source alternative to Google Analytics and a project that was launched in 2018. Uku was inspired to launch a project on IndieHackers and share his progress with the world. Eventually he decided to open the product up to the open source community. About 6 months ago, Uku and Marko decided to team up as co-founders, but due to the pandemic they haven't met face-to-face. Since launching the open source project in 2019, they've grown in popularity as more and more teams are looking at alternatives for analytics.Technologies Discussed: Google Analytics, GitHub, Ansible, Flagsmith, Elixir

In this episode, Paul Dix talks about the origins of InfluxDB, how they’ve built it into a massive project and where they are heading next. Paul shares great insights on how they found early product-market fit, decided to build a database as a product and why they saw a unique opportunity for their technology with the open source community. Technologies discussed: Redis, MongoDB, Rust, Influx Database, Flagsmith, DataDog, Apache, Database, JavaScript, API, Open Source, SQL, MySQL