A profitable business is one of the best protections for commercial open source projects and communities that depend on them. This talk draws on the experience of companies that pulled it off to explain how to do it for your own projects. We’ll discuss commercial models that actually work, giving back to the community, and gracefully collecting money for free software. We'll also touch on topics for larger projects like foundations and taking VC funding. It is possible to balance a strong belief in open source communities with making payroll every two weeks. We've done it and will share our secrets.

Data lakes on open table formats like Iceberg are a popular way to manage large datasets for analytics, data science, and AI. This talk explains how data lakes work and how to adapt open source analytic stacks to use them. First, we'll tour projects like Arrow, Iceberg, and Unity Catalog that make data lakes possible. Next, we'll see how analytic engines like DuckDB, ClickHouse, and Spark are adapting. Finally, we'll survey a few projects that enable applications written in Python, Golang, or Rust to deliver fast query. You'll have to build the app yourself but this talk will show you a path to use data lakes and open source successfully.