Just realised The Craft of Open Source podcast has been running for over 3 years!
(In fact it's been going for nearly 4 years, which is nuts.)
3 more lessons from 3+ years of speaking to open source founders and maintainers:
1. Small, bootstrapped teams can be a superpower
- The combination of small teams, open source frameworks and elastic infrastructure can be a superpower.
- It's intimidating going up against massive, VC-backed, closed-source competitors. But the open source, bootstrapped mindset is powerful. e.g. You can respond quicker, there aren't huge processes and dependencies blocking you, and you can build the way you (and your customers/users) actually want.
2. Becoming commercial open source takes a long time
- Getting to the commercial part of being a commercial open source project isn't quick. This is agreed upon by basically every open source founder I’ve spoken to.
- There are years between the inception of the project and it becoming a business entity that stands up.
3. Open source software is eating the world
- There's so much on this so I won't belabour it. More and more software and tooling frameworks have become open.
It's amazing to watch what's happening in open source right now.
(Big thanks to Paul Dix from InfluxData for being the first guest)