What about the non-DevTool open source companies?

I’m at Open Source Summit in Vancouver this week, and went to HeavyBit’s DevGuild: Open Source last week. So I’ve been up to my eyeballs in open source companies… at least open source DevTool companies.

It makes sense to me that non-DevTool open source companies aren’t represented at these conferences — after all, HeavyBit is a venture capital firm that specializes in DevTools. The people who attend conferences like Open Source Summit are usually software engineers — if your company creates open source software that’s not sold to engineering departments, it makes sense to skip it. But as a result, the conversations about open source startups and open source businesses tend to completely overlook the many open source companies that do not make DevTools. Some of which are quietly raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR.

I flew into the Oakland airport on my way to DevGuild last week. The first billboard I saw from the cab as I left the airport was for Odoo. It read “Manufacturing software that doesn’t suck.” Sexy, right? I brought up Odoo later that day in a conversation about European open source unicorns, and the person I was talking with dismissed Odoo as ‘not a unicorn.’ That’s actually not correct, since the company is valued at over $3 billion, but that’s only because of secondary investments. It’s not entirely bootstrapped, but the company has only raised $10.4 million. It’s profitable. So why don’t more people talk about Odoo? (Odoo’s founder, Fabien Pinckaers, has been on The Business of Open Source). It’s clearly an open source success story. It’s not the only non-DevTool open source company out there, but those companies are often completely left out of the conversation about building open source companies, and I suspect that’s why people don’t talk much about Odoo.

What’s my point? That when we talk about building open source businesses, we should not overlook the companies whose project and product aren’t pure ‘by and for software engineers.’ Odoo isn’t the only company out there like this — I’d put Passbolt, Cal.com, Artefactual and plenty of other companies in this category, too.

The other reason this matters is that open source companies that don’t sell to engineers have a unique perspective on how open source contributes to a company’s bottom line. They’re less likely to be an open source company because that’s just tables takes in their industry. Regardless, it’s worth including this kind of company when we talk about open source startups and open source businesses in general.