Open Source as a Business: Strategy, Struggle & Success
summary
Elastic runs Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash and grows to 1,100 people while funding that via support, X-Pack commercial extensions, and hosted cloud services; tradeoffs include weakened support renewals, competitors offering cheaper consulting, and cloud providers rehosting services (AWS example: Korean analyzer caused a 15–20x slowdown). Companies try models: Red Hat–style support, open‑core plugins, hosted SaaS (WordPress / Sentry), donations (Wikimedia ~ $90M), and restrictive clauses like the Commons Clause or SSPL that bar cloud resale.
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:06Who is contributing back
- 2:16Open Source as a business model
- 4:48Where is the money
- 5:09Strategy
- 7:55Open Core
- 9:10Commercial
- 10:38Service
- 11:50Cloud Providers
- 12:53Partnership
- 13:38Donations
- 14:51Certified Partners
- 15:19Commercial Ecosystem
- 15:30Adblock
- 16:32Swag
- 17:04Bounties
- 18:37Struggle
- 21:02The vultures
- 23:18Is this still open source
- 25:32Redis
- 28:47Timing
- 32:02Freeloaders
- 33:31Money
- 34:19Development
- 37:03Releases
- 39:01Open Source Heart
- 41:20Elastic Search
- 42:03Success
- 43:15Business is complicated
- 44:05Questions
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