IT Ops Query

Emily Fox has held multiple roles at household-name organizations in her 13-year IT career and is currently senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Previously, she worked as an engineer at Apple, and DevOps Security Lead at the National Security Agency. She also serves as chair of the CNCF's technical oversight committee and is involved in a variety of open source communities and activities. From her unique vantage point, she addresses the delicate balance the CNCF must strike between enterprises, open source maintainers and open product companies; growing awareness about open source sustainability issues; and how all of that feeds into a general "crisis of conscience" going on in cybersecurity.

How is open source sustainability similar to the subprime mortgage crisis? And what can an episode of South Park teach us about open product business models? Dan Lorenc has a uniquely multifaceted view of these and other questions – he worked at Google from 2012 to 2021, began contributing to open source projects in the Kubernetes community in 2016, and along the way, developed the tooling that would become the Sigstore project, which helps to verify the provenance of open source code packages. Sigstore is now governed by the OpenSSF, where Dan is a member of the Technical Advisory Council. He is also co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, a software supply chain security startup. Find out what Dan's take is on everything from the "Tragedy of the Commons" idea itself to the government's role in open source maintenance, the CNCF's role in open products, "open source lite" licenses and what's worked for Chainguard's business so far in this episode.

Tobie Langel is Principal and Managing Partner at UnlockOpen, a consulting firm in Geneva that advises clients on working with the open tech ecosystem. Langel is a passionate advocate for open source, and in February, he gave a presentation at the­ State of Open Conference in London urging funding for open source maintainers. Here, he discusses the distinction between open source development and open source maintenance, why open source sustainability issues persist and why $1 billion or even $10 billion per year isn't too much to ask of the global tech industry to fund open source maintenance -- especially in an age of vulnerabilities such as log4shell and ongoing software supply chain attacks.

Bruce Perens created the definition of open source and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He has said in recent public interviews, however, that open source has failed, and called for its overhaul under his Post-Open project. In this episode, Beth caught up with him to hear more about his ideas for the world after open source.

Adam Jacob is CEO and co-founder of System Initiative, an infrastructure automation software startup that came out of stealth in 2023. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Chef Software, which also focused on infrastructure automation, and was sold to Progress Software in 2020. Chef had roots in open source, and underwent a license change in 2019; Jacob has taken a different tack with his new company. In this episode, he discusses his "speed run" through the various permutations of open source business models during his career, and how the industry can use the lessons learned by a generation of open product entrepreneurs to improve open source-based business sustainability.

Alexis Richardson co-founded a company in 2014 called Weaveworks, which created an open source GitOps project called Flux CD. In February, the company ceased operations, despite having gained new customers in 2023. Among the events that precipitated the closure of the business were acquisition talks with a larger company that fell through "at the 11th hour," according to a post by Richardson on LinkedIn. Weaveworks is one example of a company associated with a flourishing open source project – Flux CD continues under the CNCF – that ultimately couldn't make the business side work. Richardson gives his take on what happened with the company and how the CNCF could help businesses like it in the future, as well as what he's got planned next.

William Morgan is CEO at Buoyant, a company that sells commercial and SaaS support for the Linkerd service mesh project and employs all of its maintainers. In February, Buoyant announced it would no longer be making a certain class of the project's code, called stable release artifacts, available for free to production users with more than 50 employees. Morgan discusses community reaction to that change and his outlook on the future of open source. 

Chad Whitacre is head of open source at Sentry, an application and performance monitoring software maker that moved to a business source license for its products in 2019, and then to a functional source license in November 2023. Most recently, Chad has been working on a new project called Software Commons over the last six months, with the goal of balancing the user freedom prioritized by open source software with developer sustainability. In this episode, he discusses the tragedy of the commons vs enclosure, open source vs open products, BSL vs FSL and more.

I'm Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, and this is IT Ops Query, a new podcast that distills the signal from the noise about enterprise digital transformation and IT operations. In this first season, I'm talking to guests about the ongoing friction between open source software principles and sustainability. Join me March 28 for a series of weekly episodes featuring the IT experts, entrepreneurs, and community leaders involved in determining the path forward for enterprise open source.