Ensuring a Project's Long-Term Survival with William Morgan

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have an episode recorded on site at KubeCon EU in Paris with William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant. We had a fabulous conversation, which touched on some touchy subjects, including Buoyant’s slightly changing relationship with Linkerd. But we talked about:

  • Being an open source mercenary, but also being dedicated to making Linkerd a ‘proper’ open source project

  • Feeling like open source was table stakes for a company in the space Buoyant plays in. This is an under-appreciated reason for being an open source company — you feel like it’s just expected in the market you play in, so you do.

  • Waiting too long (or is it too long?) to commercialize

  • Starting out by selling support, but the problem with that because Linkerd worked well and people kept saying that they didn’t need support because they never had problems

  • Competing against Istio, which was backed by the Google engine and how that made Linkerd / Buoyant an underdog (or cockroach).

  • For those of you who haven’t been following Linkerd / Buoyant… Buoyant recently announced that they would be doing edge releases for Linkerd, but not stable releases. We talked about why they made this change and how the ecosystem responded.

Check out the full episode!

Emily Omier