OSEN SF Meetup - Business of Open Source

Open Source Entrepreneurship and Business Transformation

John Mark WalkerFounder, Open Source Entrepreneur Network - osenetwork.com

Automation

Community

Collaboration

Governance

“There is no open source business model”– Stephen Walli

What is an Open Source Entrepreneur?

Automation

Community

Collaboration

Governance

Methodologies that enable automation, eg. CI/CD, M&O tools, and business process

Silo-busting, enabling inter-team

communication, thawing the “frozen

middle”, adopting community best

practices internally

Where internal meets external, optimizing engineering process for external participation

Enabling business affairs and legal to be

innovation partners, not stifling. Licensing

and compliance.

Inter-disciplinary skill set● Master of automation, embracing DevOps methodologies

● Collaborate following innersource best practices, breaking down silo-ed compartmentalization

● Optimize bi-directional pathways between internal and external communities, reducing technical debt

● Integrate license compliance and supply chain management into product development

● Product owners must be knowledgeable of the above

What is an Open Source Entrepreneur?

>DevOps is not enough<

Lock-in risk ->

Infra

stru

ctur

e ris

k ->

Profitabilityline

Open Source Product Risk Graph

Supply Chain Funnel

Cutting edge components

Finished Product

Integration + PM Process

Interested in software supply chain efficiency and risk mitigation?● See https://openchainproject.org/

Open Source Software Supply Chain Funnel

Individual Components

Open Source

Distribution

Community “Product” for End Users

Finished Product

2nd Stage: “Middle” Distribution

Open Source

Distribution

Community “Product” for End Users

• Artifact of BC (Before CI) era• Required stopping point from leading edge to

polished• Great way to see if product design would hold

together• In the old days, components were individually

packaged and maintained• Source code repos were not easily distributed• Don’t need 2nd stage if continuously improving and

integrating along path to multiple releases• In a linear development path, 2nd stage obsolete

What Purpose Does the 2nd Stage Serve?

• The community distribution filled other purposes, perhaps unwittingly

• More relevant once you take a non-linear view

• It’s all about the ecosystem

• 1 code base serves many masters

Open Source Platform

Product

Community

Community Product

Community

ProductProduct Community

It Was Never About Innovation

There is an art …or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

…Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

- Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Innovation and Open Source

• Innovation was never the intent, but an interesting side benefit

• The intent was to create a fair system for creating and using software

• Innovation happened because of the rules governing open source systems

Old proprietary model

Vendor

Customer

Open source model

Vendor Customer

Cloud Native Supply Chain Funnel

Open Source Components

Release

Continuous Improvement

Agile Processes

Release Release

v1 v2 v3

…vN+1

Cloud Native Supply Chain Funnel

Open Source Components

Release

Continuous Improvement

Agile Processes

Release Release

v1 v2 v3

…vN+1

● Assumes single product destination● How can you try “crazy stuff” without

messing up release process?● How do external communities contribute?

Orthogonal Innovation

Individual Components

Open Source

DistributionFinished Product

Communities in the Ecosystem

Products in the Ecosystem

Orthogonal Innovation: Real World Examples

Individual Components

Debian Ubuntu

Communities in the Ecosystem

Products in the Ecosystem

Orthogonal Innovation: Real World Examples

Individual Components

Moby Docker

Communities in the Ecosystem

Products in the Ecosystem

Orthogonal Innovation: Real World Examples

OCI

k8s

Individual Components

???? GKE, Etc.

Communities in the Ecosystem

Products in the Ecosystem

Orthogonal Innovation: Pros and Cons

Cons• It’s messy, complicated• Not every project needs to be a

platform for the world

Pros• Constant integration of new

technology on multiple axes• Build reliable supply chain, and

influence multiple supply chains• Core platform gets lots of extra testing

and bug-fixing from multiple sources• Reduces risk from external

communities adding/changing code

Further reading:The Art of Community: http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/ InnerSource Commons: https://paypal.github.io/InnerSourceCommons/ Producing Open Source Software, by Karl Fogel: http://producingoss.com/ Core Infrastructure Initiative: https://coreinfrastructure.org/Open Chain Project: https://openchainproject.org/Roads and Bridges, by Nadia Eghbal: Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor

Behind Our Digital Infrastructure

Want in-depth content? RSVP now for the 1st OSEN Symposium, co-located with the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit ($150/ticket):

● https://osen17.eventbrite.com/

● Open Source Summit attendees can also register for the event

● Want to sponsor? Contact me for details

Thank you!

How may we contact thee? Let me count the ways!

● Web site: https://osenetwork.com/● Twitter: @osenetwork @johnmark● Email: osen@johnmark.org

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