Stephen Walli

See the following -

A Framework For Building Products From Open Source Projects

If your experience with technology resembles mine in any way, you know intuitively that the projects we DIY are not the same as the products we spend money buying. This isn't a new observation in the open source community...Sarah Novotny, who led the Kubernetes community and was heavily involved in the Nginx and MySQL communities, emphatically articulated at the inaugural Open Core Summit that the open source project a company shepherds and the product that a company sells are two completely different things. Yet, project and product continue to be conflated by maintainers-turned-founders of commercial open source software (COSS) companies, especially (and ironically) when the open source project gets traction. This mistake gets repeated, I believe, because it's hard to mentally conceptualize how and why a commercial product should be different when the open source project is already being used widely.

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Building a Business on a Solid Open Source Model

Since we announced Nextcloud, an ownCloud fork, many people have asked me how we plan to build a sustainable, healthy open source business. My short answer is that it requires a strong focus on maintaining a careful balance between the needs of all stakeholders: users, contributors, employees, customers, and—of course—investors. Building a solid open source business requires that management has confidence in the abilities of your company, stakeholders must be on board with the business model, and everyone must understand that balance is important for the ecosystem. Like a rising tide lifts all boats, a strong ecosystem benefits all stakeholders...

How Community Building Can Help an Organization's Bottom Line

In this article, I'll look at community from a business perspective, including the effect community can have on an organization's bottom line. Although there are communities everywhere, I'll approach the topic—meaning, communities, their members, and their contributors—from a free/open source perspective. So please stick around, and maybe you'll learn ways to communicate the importance of community to your organization...

How to Sell Open Source Software - Glyptodon's Success Story

Every business model has its tradeoffs, with pros and cons. In the case of Glyptodon, they made a bet that they could build a viable commercial brand with 100% open source software. That bet has paid off, and it has allowed the Glyptodon founders to build a business without outside funding. The hope is that their story helps other entrepreneurs who are struggling with how to build a sustainable business selling open source software. For every company founder who was told it couldn't be done, Glyptodon wants you to know it is absolutely possible-you can build and sell open source products. The key is to establish a trusted commercial brand and sell the overall solution.

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Community Leadership Summit 2017

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
May 6, 2017 - 10:30am - May 7, 2017 - 8:00pm
Location: 
Austin Convention Center
500 E. Cesar Chavez St.
Austin, TX 78701
United States

The Community Leadership Summit 2017 is a free conference designed to foster community and collaboration by bringing together community leaders, managers and organizers, as well as the projects and organizations, to discuss building effective communities through community management, relations and online collaboration. The event is designed with an "open summit" nature to allow for a wide-ranging set of topics and also for active attendee participation. The Community Leadership Summit will be held the weekend before OSCON in the same venue and will feature a number of speakers from the open source community in a mixed format that includes keynotes, unconference sessions, and panel discussions...

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