The business model of open source (The Changelog #460)

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.

Discuss on Changelog News

Changelog++ members get a bonus 11 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors

InfluxDB – InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog

Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.

Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com

Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring

Adam Jacob – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Adam Stacoviak – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Jerod Santo – Twitter, GitHub

Notes and Links

Read this Twitter thread from Adam Jacob
The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source featuring Adam Jacob
The Changelog #429: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS (a deep dive on the business of open source)
Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef
Chef co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob stepping down, will remain on board of directors
Tailwind CSS
Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB
Founders Talk #75: The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience

featuring Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-founder of Cockroach Labs
System Initiative

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!