Building Commercial Open Source Software: Part 1 — Community & Market Fit

Since the early 90s, with the emergence of the MIT free software movement and popularity of Linux, there has been an accelerating shift away from proprietary, closed software to open source.

Today the open source ecosystem has over 40M registered users, 2.9M organizations, and 44M projects on Github alone. Just in 2019, 10M new developers joined the GitHub community, contributing to 44M+ repos across the world.

Open source continues to be the heartbeat of the software community and one of the largest and growing segments of the market by IPO, M&A, and market cap; with new projects emerging well beyond low-level systems to machine learning, data infrastructure, messaging, orchestration, and more.

Companies such as Hashicorp, Astronomer*, Puppet, Confluent, and Databricks are a new approach to commercial open source, with a focus on deploying their open cores to the broad developer community and the largest companies in the world with enterprise-ready needs attached to them. All while actively contributing to the community and gradually opening up more of the closed platform to the community — and building big, meaningful businesses along the way.

These new approaches are building platforms that wrap open core packages with support…