Episode 46: Commercial Open Source with Joseph Jacks

Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest
Joseph Jacks Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital Show Notes
Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special
guest, Joseph Jacks, Founder of OSS Capital and also works on Open
Core Summit, which is a conference he founded as well. Today we
discuss with Joseph what he does at OSS Capital, the companies they
invest in and how he helps commercial Open Source Companies. We
will also find out about what he did at Open Core Summit last year
and find out about when and where the next one will take place.
Download this episode now to find out more! [00:01:10] Joseph tells
us what he does at OSS Capital. He also tells us what he means by
Commercial Open Source. [00:03:22] Richard and Joseph discuss
GitHub and GitLab. [00:11:29] Justin brings up the business source
license which is very controversial, and he wants to know Joseph’s
involvement with it. [00:17:08] Joseph tells us about OSS.cash, the
conference he did in 2013 with the spreadsheet data, and how the
Open Core Summit went in September 2019, right before COVID hit.
[00:22:49] Eric is fascinated by Joseph’s process and he says it
seems like he’s trying to find that brief moment when a project
starts to take off, but hasn’t really considered creating a
corporation, creating a company to generate money around it. It
seems like you’re looking for a unicorn before it grows its horn.
Joseph elaborates on this. [00:26:48] Joseph talks about RISC-V
since they are invested in that company. He also tells us other
companies they are invested in. [00:30:36] Joseph explains how
commercial offensive software companies are different. Also, he
tells us how they help commercial Open Source Companies early on.
[00:37:03] Where can you find Joseph on the Internet, URL’s, or
Twitter? Find out here. Spotlight [00:37:44] Justin’s spotlight is
EB.js. [00:38:23] Eric’s spotlight is since Code Fund shut down, he
wants to extend his gratitude and say thank you to all the
publishers, open source projects, bloggers, application builders,
maintainers, and all of them that were within the network.
[00:39:32] Richard’s spotlight is scuttlebutt.nz. [00:40:09]
Joseph’s spotlight is the Kubernetes project. Quotes [00:04:14] “I
tend to think of the companies as slightly different in terms of
what they focus on and GitHub has sort of like a Facebook social
network feel, you know, huge amounts of people collaborating on
public Open Source repos.” [00:05:18] “And so even though the core,
the Open Source core for GitHub is very small, it’s sort of super
tiny core, and the crust around that Open Source core is really
thick, like basically all of GitHub.com, all this proprietary
technology they’ve added around it, I’ve still viewed it as
commercial Open Source because that sort of existential definition
is still true.” [00:16:03] “Another one is WSO2 in Sri Lanka. The
WSO2 is a company in the middleware kind of category and the
enterprise IT world. They sell products for connecting applications
and doing messaging integration, integration middleware, SOA
software, and business process management, lots of things of this
nature.” [00:19:58] “The spreadsheet motivated starting OSS capital
for sure, and also Open Core Summit. I guess the reason is because
this thing’s kind of been maintained for going on seven years now I
guess, and the growth of this spreadsheet’s been pretty
substantial.” [00:23:15] “Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems
like you’re looking for a unicorn before it grows its horn.” Links
Joseph Jacks Twitter (https://twitter.com/asynchio?lang=en) OSSC
(https://oss.capital/) Open Core Summit Twitter
(https://twitter.com/opencoresummit?lang=en) Open Core Summit
(https://opencoresummit.com/) COSS Index
(https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBoWMxNvWiwt2R-t4e_l7LPLhU/edit#gid=0)
Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/) Kubernetes
(https://kubernetes.io/) Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman
Produced by Rebase (https://rebase.fm/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by
DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Special Guest: Joseph Jacks.