Inside Open Source #2
All things Open Source: Interesting reads, startup news, trivia and views from Europe
Welcome to issue #2 of the Inside Open Source Newsletter
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💡Thoughts from the Inside
"I am a lazy person, which is why I like open source, for other people to do work for me." (source)
Linus Torvalds - Creator of Linux, Android, ChromeOS and Git
🛠Useful resources
Github Analytics Dashboard
by Julia Schottenstein (@j_schottenstein) from NEA
Overview of Companies and Repos with the highest growth in the categories Stars, Contributors, Issues
Information about Forks, Commits, PRs, Watchers, Contributor Coverage
Company headcount and fundraising data
Chrome Extension for Github Star History
by Tim Qian (@Tim_Qian)
Super useful for a quick assessment of the history of Github Star growth of a repository (especially from an investor’s perspective)
Search Engine for Open Source Projects
“Find Open Source Projects By Searching, Browsing and Combining 7,000 Topics Across 59 Categories And 356,252 Projects”
🗺European Commercial OSS Landscape
In late 2020 a consortium of executives at large European corporations, Founders and CEOs of European open source startups as well as VCs who are actively investing in open source companies started the Open Source Business Forum O4B.
O4B - The Open Source Business Forum is about building a lasting platform of relevant stakeholders to inspire and accelerate dialogue and action to help Europe realize its potential. O4B is about demonstrating that the European open source community is open for business.
In the course of this great initiative, Johannes Landgraf (Founder of Gitpod) and Dominik Tobschall (Principal at Speedinvest) developed the first-ever European Commercial OSS Landscape
🤓Interesting Reads
Closed vs. Open Core
by Joseph Jacks
Joseph is the founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a dedicated Commercial Open Source Venture Capital Fund. Prior to his life as a VC, Joseph founded KubeCon (now run by the Linux Foundation's CNCF) and Kismatic, the first enterprise-focused commercial Kubernetes company (acquired by Apprenda, subsequently acquired by ATOS). Joseph is also the founder of Open Core Summit.
Check out his overview of the fundamental difference between closed and open-core developer-focused software products. Although I would politely disagree on a few points he makes, I really like the information density that the overview provides for newcomers in the OSS domain! Obviously, there is not much context yet about the nuanced differences in the categories but I think a exhaustive blog post is upcoming soon :)
Classification of OSS project types
by Nadia Eghbal
In her great book “Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software“, Nadia lays out the different types of projects in the Open Source world. Sidenote: her book is a must-read for everybody interested in the OSS space!
In the graphic below you can find her overview of the different characteristics and resulting project types.
Federations
rare but super impactful projects
although federations are less than 3% of all Open Source projects, they occupy the most mindshare due to the size of each project
examples: Linux, Rust, Node.js, etc.
Clubs
a roughly overlapping group of contributors and users —> users are more likely to participate as contributors
nichey topics (e.g. programming languages for mathematicians)
highly sticky for users / community members
examples: Clojure, Haskell, Erlang, etc.
Stadiums
contributor base does not grow proportionally to their users
many widely depended-upon packages and libraries fit into this type
centralized community structure
huge supply-side economies of scale (high upfront costs, but once the infrastructure is in place each additional customer is cheap to serve)
examples: webpack, Babel, Bundler, RSpec, etc.
Toys
think of personal side or weekend projects
Thanks to everybody for signing up for this newsletter —> Feedback is always welcome!
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