Products, consulting, and open source with Andrew Martin

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Andrew Martin, CEO and founder of Control Plane.

Control Plane is ultimately a consulting company, as Andrew introduced it. But the company also created and maintains KubeSec, and also has an enterprise version of Flux CD that it licenses. That gives this conversation a slightly different flavor from the usual.

Here’s some of the things we talked about:

• The business ROI that Andrew expected to get from releasing KubeSec, and whether or not he as actually seen those expected results play out
• The difference between bootstrapping a company by offering services and by offering consulting — specifically what the difference between services and consulting is.
• The problem with “drive-by” feature development in open source projects — when people contribute features but don’t commit to the ongoing maintenance of the project
• Why Control Plane decided to release an enterprise version of FluxCD, and how the enterprise version of Flux is differentiated from the pure open source project.
• Why underinvesting in marketing, especially in marketing for the open source projects, was a mistake

Join us at Open Source Founders Summit if you want more conversations about how companies are built around open source projects, from consultancies to large corporations.