Mobilize Your Community Army: A Commercial OpenSource's Perspective

Today's developer relations are inevitably tied to open-source software and its communities. Understanding different open source communities by category and formulating open source strategies within the corporate strategy framework to form good interactions with open source developers and jointly create value has become a topic that developer relations workers must understand and master.

This speech first classifies open source communities from multiple dimensions to clarify the characteristics and modes of getting along with different communities; then discusses how commercial open source should adapt to different corporate strategies and open source community categories; finally, it gives an example of the relationship between open source developers The entry point of work includes how to establish corresponding portraits and segmentations, and how to carry out specific job based on content and coordination.

1. Mobilize Your Community Army A Commercial OpenSource's Perspective @tison , ASF Member & Incubator Mentor; PMC Member of Apache OpenDAL and more

2. About Me $DAYJOB Currently, Stealth Database Startup 2024: Greptime, Growth and DevRel 2022: StreamNative, Community Manager 2021: PingCAP, Developer Advocate Formerly, Software Developer Engineer Open Source Apache Member and Incubator Mentor Committer for Apache Flink, Curator, ZooKeeper and more Team Member for TiDB and GreptimeDB Former Team Member for Perl 6 (Raku)

3. Open-Source Taxonomy Individuals: Driven by Developer’s demands Examples Jackson Nom (Parser Combinator in Rust) Many other libraries, tools and small apps Challenges Sustain the One Man Army Rely on self engagement, and thus can suffer from shifted motivation

4. Open-Source Taxonomy Community: Mass Innovation and Open Collaboration Examples Vim Vue.js Apache DataFusion and most of ASF TLPs Challenges Sustain a (small) core team Build a diverse community Collaborate over the world

5. Open-Source Taxonomy Enterprise: Common Library, Framework, and the Standard Examples Protocol Buffers React Apache OpenDAL Challenges Prove the value to managers Often underestimate the challenge to become the standard

6. Open-Source Taxonomy Commercial: Ecosystem and the Industry Baseline Examples Delta Lake VictoriaMetrics Apache Polaris (incubating) Challenges Sustain the company You can never make money by selling open source software

7. COS: Selling Open-Source Software? MongoDB (AGPLv3 to SSPLv1) Airbyte (MIT to ELv2) CockroachDB (ALv2 to BuSL 1.1) Akka (ALv2 to BuSL 1.1) Hashicorp (MPL to BuSL 1.1) ElasticSearch (ALv2 to ELv2 to ALv2) Finally, they will all switch to licenses that prevent competitors. https://www.tisonkun.org/2023/03/30/open-source-is-not-business-model/ https://www.tisonkun.org/2022/10/04/bait-and-switch-fauxpen-source-strategy/

8. COS: Provision Aiven Percona Cloud Providers … Leverage existing open-source software (No extra R &D costs).

9. COS: Distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux Tetrate Istio Subscription Cloudera CDH and more … Mainly for Security and Compliance; Tidelift that directly run by company

10. COS vs. OSS Commercialization? Leverage Open-Source Factors in Business Apache Arrow, Apache OpenDAL, etc. The boundary of Commercial Open-Source Industry Baseline ( Vi ctoriaMetrics , Apache Polaris, etc.) API should be open (source) for freely integrated into the ecosystem Essential user experiences should be “free” for smooth onboarding Elastic’s “Open” and “Free” Open for integrations Free for download Contributing Back and Upstream First Keep Open and Collaborative for Integrations

11. Case Study: The Database and its OSS twin The Database Private and proprietary. A flexible database built upon cloud services. Contributing back Apache Arrow: Cast between durations and numbers Apache OpenDAL: More options on the AliyunOSS backend, data object configs, etc. Poem, Reedline , and even Rust’s standard library Usage feedback is also important Common Libraries Logforth : A versatile and extensible logging implementation Cronexpr : A library to parse and drive crontab expressions T-Digest: A Rust implementation of the t-digest algorithm An Open-Source Twin Morax : Message queue and data streaming with a similar architecture as the database

12. (Open-Source) Community Values For Community Members Production Usage: The closest and strongest relationship Technology Investment: What if I’m the first contributors to Kubernetes? Growing Skills: Eager for Mentorship and Guidelines For Public Good: Not through seeking For the Company Marketing Product Engineering Business Development Recruitment and Services Sales Leads Your community members work for the community, not for you. https://tisonkun.org/2022/02/10/value-creation/ https://tisonkun.org/2024/01/26/devrel-qualified-leads/

13. Look Inside: Persona and Segment Awareness Views, Forks, Stars, Likes, … Content, Trend, Meetups Engagement Proactive participation Value position + use cases Quickstart and How- tos Being open and responsive Adoption Using or testing the product Value position + use cases Solutions and scenario-based comparisons Advocate Partners, continuously promote the product Value position + use cases Partner or contributor success stories

14. Readings for Developers https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html https://www.tisonkun.org/2021/12/05/open-organization/ https://www.tisonkun.org/2021/12/14/the-cathedral-and-the-bazaar/

15. Readings for DevRelers

16. Thanks!