Open Source as a Business (PyCon SG 2014)

Transcript

1. OPEN SOURCE David Cramer twitter.com/zeeg AS A BUSINESS
2. I work at Dropbox
3. but this is a story about Sentry
6. It started with a "How do I.."
7. django-db-log (2008)
8. (so ugly that we have no screenshots)
9. Basically awful, yet
   DISQUS found value in it
10. django-sentry (2010)
12. Still semi-awful, but progress!
13. Sentry (2011)
15. Finally convinced someone better at design to help
16. Sentry (Today)
18. Maintained by the Community
20. The company maintains clients in
    PHP, Python, Node, JavaScript, Java, and Ruby
21. Realistically we only write
    Python and JavaScript
22. An unfortunate truth
24. All is not lost!
25. A large ecosystem of developers Raven.NET chef-sentry-handler heka-py-raven logging (R) metlog-raven nagios-sentry pyramid_sentry raven-asc3 raven-cfml raven-cpp raven-csharp raven-erlang raven-go raven-grails raven-java raven-js raven-node raven-objc raven-osx raven-php raven-python raven-ruby raven-sh raven-ssas sentry-assign sentry-bitbucket sentry-campfire sentry-facebook sentry-github sentry-groveio sentry-hipchat sentry-irc sentry-irccat sentry-jira sentry-jsonmailprocessor sentry-notifico sentry-notifry sentry-pivotal sentry-plugin-ipaddresses sentry-sprintly sentry-sprunge sentry-trello sentry-youtrack symfony-amg-sentry-plugin
26. The value of open source is not
    in others maintaining your code
27. The community builds things
    we cannot or will not build ourselves
28. Companies get value in recruiting efforts
    and visibility in the technology world
29. It should take minimal effort to convince a company of open source
30. Most of my work at Dropbox is completely open source because its only beneficial
31. On To Business
32. Why start a company?
33. "You should create an AddOn out of Sentry"
    - @craigkerstiens (Heroku)
34. "Beer money? That can't be that hard!"
    - Overconfident me
35. Three months later I spent Christmas
    building @getsentry on Heroku
36. While waiting for Heroku's AddOn validation we
    decided we could collect money using Stripe
37. Two days later we finally had
    our first paying customer (Feb 28, 2012)
38. Shout out to @mattrobenolt
39. (who also wrote raven-js and raven-node)
40. (and became an easy hire for Disqus)
41. Our Guiding Principals
42. #1: Nothing is Free
43. We must create a sustainable hosted platform,
    but always remember people can host it themselves
44. #2: Don't Over Charge
45. We bill based on what costs us money
    There is no per-seat, or per-project pricing
46. #3: Open Source First
47. We will not fork Sentry and the only private
    code is our subscription management and billing
48. #4: Our Ideas are Best
49. Listen to feedback, but never compromise the platform
    by adding features just because they're requested
50. "Lean"
51. Early on our entire mission was simply
    "Don't spend any money"
52. If you continually take a loss it's
    hard to prove that it's worth driving forward
53. Heroku helped us get launched by
    covering our bill for the first three months
54. SoftLayer put us into their incubator
    program giving us $1,000 in credit per month
55. Most importantly we were
    charging from day one
56. Open Source is Hard
57. What your community wants and what a business needs are usually different
58. We need to manage subscription quotas but
    the self-hosted version probably doesn't care
59. We end up with a very large amount of extension
    points so @getsentry can hook public APIs
60. At times we just straight up add tooling to Sentry assuming no one will ever use it
61. Catering to Customers
62. We try to build a product that we love
    which we believe creates a product our users love
63. It doesn't matter whether you're a paying customer or you self-host — users are users
64. Our belief is that the care we take with our product
    leads to a successful viral and organic growth
65. Which means we get to build an awesome product that anyone can use without restrictions
66. We're Not a Real Company
67. We built Sentry at DISQUS entirely
    because we had problems we wanted to solve
68. It's hard to think of it as a business because it feels like we're still just hacking on open source
69. The entire time my co-founder and myself have been
    full-time employees at other companies
70. We spend lots of weekends and
    evenings "working" on @getsentry
71. That time spent has made some great
    things possible both for DISQUS and contributors
72. We get to blow the money on fun things, like sponsoring events, picking up the bar tab, etc.
73. "If you do what you love
    you'll never work a day in your life"
74. Thank You!