2025-11-07 –, Room 145
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.
Robert Hodges serves as CEO at Altinity, an enterprise provider for ClickHouse. Robert has over 30 years of experience with database systems and applications including pre-relational databases such as M204, online SQL transaction processing, Hadoop, and analytics. In the last few years, his work has focused on analytical databases, Kubernetes, and open source. Robert is the founder of the Open Source Analytics Conference (osacon.io).