Hi,
Welcome to the CTO Summer Camp! For the next several weeks, attendees will receive one email per week with resources that will help them level up on a core tech topic.
In the first email, we focused on open-source. We’ve got insight into how to monetize open-source projects, recommendations for the best open-source tools to help your business, and interviews with open-source champions who shared their experience.
Know any friends who would be interested in the CTO Summer Camp? It’s not too late to register!
And without further ado, let’s jump into all things open-source…
Our world would not function without open-source
Open-source now covers a vast range of business models and can represent many things, from small one-person projects to billion-dollar companies with thousands of employees. But open-source goes beyond just a business model, it is a way of developing.
The rise of Software-as-a-Service brought open-source startups into the mix. These new businesses balance the values of open-source with monetization and growth. This combination takes the best of both worlds to pave a new way– check out Sentry, Medusa, or Grafana for examples.
But there are still projects struggling to maintain their code. Did you know that cURL had over 10 billion downloads, yet only 8 people maintaining it?
We chose to focus on open-source for our first episode of the CTO Summer Camp because like every company and individual using the Internet, Scaleway needs open-source. We do our best to give back by financing, promoting, and contributing to open-source. But it’s challenging to balance the ideals of open-source with business objectives–so we put together these resources to make it easier.
How to champion open-source
…when you have a startup to run?
- Use open-source and say it loud
The more people use and promote open-source projects, the more credibility, visibility, and (ultimately) developers an open-source project will have. - Contribute back
If you use an open-source project, helping to improve it helps the project and, in the end, your company too. - Give some money
If you use open-source tools you know are small projects, even small donations can make a big difference. - Ship open-source projects
Open-source the tools and projects that won’t compromise your competitive advantage as a company.
How to monetize your open-source projects
If you are building an open-source project, here are a few ways to monetize your project.
- Offer a hosted version: Allow clients to choose between self-hosting or a paid full package in which your company manages security and maintenance. This model also opens the door to new users with less technical savvy.
- Paid feature requests: The basic software is distributed in open-source, but additional features come at a cost.
- Support plans: When companies need troubleshooting for an open-source software, the creators of that open-source software are usually the best bet for quality help.
- Sponsors and donations: Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors are both great platforms to get financial support for your open-source project.
- Open Core Model: The core of your project is open-source, but add-ons are proprietary software.
- Training and certifications: Make open-source software more accessible to enterprises by selling training–just like the Linux Foundation.
Resources
👉 The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
If you are interested in the challenges open-source communities face, try reading Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal. She gives a thorough analysis of not only the problems facing open-source, but possible solutions too.
👉 40+ open-source tools to build and scale your project
Description: We curated 40+ open-source projects from infrastructure tools to project management to help you scale your business.
👉 How we built and open-sourced Scaleway UI
Description: Our console team explains why they built Scaleway UI, why they chose to open-source it, and how building in the open affected the process. Spoiler alert: It helped motivate them!
👉 Deploy BigBlueButton on your Elastic Metal server
BigBlueButton is a powerful web conferencing system that allows you to communicate with remote team members over fully encrypted connections using TLS/SSL. The application was developed for academic use, but its features correspond to business needs too. With BigBlueButton, you can screen share, share presentations and external videos, work with collaborative whiteboards, send conference invitations via a custom URL, communicate with a built-in chat during a video conference, integrate surveys, and record conferences.
👉 20+ years of building on open-source
Jean-Baptiste shared what open-source needs to thrive and what companies can do to improve the state of open-source.
👉 Secrets to success for open-source startups
Laetitia (PostgreSQL and Enterprise DB) and Benoit (Akeneo) shared their experience building open-source startups. They discuss the challenges open-source startups face, and how they balance building for the community and building for customers.
And that wraps up the first edition of the CTO Summer Camp!
Next week, we will talk about scalability: How can you balance an ambitious scaling plan with the pressure to control costs, reduce your carbon footprint, and create a resilient infrastructure?
To get the resources directly into your inbox, register here:
