IT Ops Query

A Weaveworks post-mortem and the open core business model

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.

Linkerd's existential question about open source code

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. 

Open source vs source available code and balancing freedom with sustainability

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.

Trailer: IT Ops Query Season 1. Tech's Tragedy of the Commons

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.