What does open source success look like?

Whether you’re talking to founders of open source startups, solo maintainers or OSPO leaders, there’s general agreement about one thing: If you want your open source project to be a success, you have to first decide what success means to you.

This is one of the many differences between open source projects and commercial products. Commercial products are a success when they are profitable. You can split hairs and find edge cases, but if you say ‘product X was a success’ to 100 people, they will all understand that you mean it was wildly profitable.

If you tell 100 people that ‘open source project Y was a success,’ you will elicit 200 different ideas about what that might mean. It could be:

  • The project was downloaded millions of times

  • The project is used in production by Fortune 50 companies

  • The project helped the maintainer get a good job

  • The project increased the company’s innovation

  • The project drove adoption of the company’s commercial product

  • The project helped the company recruit better engineers

  • … and on and on.

The point is, if you’re investing in an open source project, especially as a startup founder dedicating a huge percentage of resources towards that project, you need to clearly define how you expect the project to contribute to the company and how you’ll know it is successful. If you don’t know where your project should be going, it’s going to be really hard to steer it in the right direction.

Even in the universe of open source startups, there are multiple ways the project might contribute to the business — it might be an adoption play, a way to get through security audits, a POC replacement, an innovation driver, etc. Decide what your OSS’s most important contribution is so you can make sure it’s pulling the weight you want it to.

And… by the way. I’ll be at the HeavyBit DevGuild conference on May 4th, in San Francisco to moderate a panel on connecting community activity to commercial adoption. If you’ll be there, let me know — I’d love to connect.

Emily Omier