Are we setting up for another wave of recession-induced open source migration? Donald Fischer weighs in:
It’s been hard to be optimistic the last few weeks. But as I look for a silver lining in the current crisis, I believe there is an enormous opportunity for organizations to get even more nimble in their use of open source.
Tidelift CEO, Donald Fischer:
Today’s generation of entrepreneurial open source creators is leaving behind the scarcity mindset that bore open core and its brethren. Instead, they’re advancing an optimistic, additive, and still practical model that adds missing commercial value on top of raw open source.
(Tidelift is a frequent sponsor of ours here at Changelog)
In this special crossover episode of Founders Talk, Adam talks with Donald Fischer. Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.
Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.
Our friends at Tidelift have joined data from GitHub and their own Libraries.io, “the largest open source software dataset in the world,” — which covers over 2.8 million open source projects. They were able to combine the two datasets to gather the entire commit history of each project on GitHub to more closely examine the following questions:
- What exactly has been Microsoft’s role in the open source community?
- In which projects and ecosystems have they contributed most?
- Have those contributions been focused on the large Microsoft open source initiatives, or has the company also participated in projects beyond their immediate purview?
They were also careful to clean the dataset of forks and duplicate packages which would misinform this analysis.
So what’s the verdict? Microsoft may have a mixed history with open source, but today the company is demonstrating some impressive traction when it comes to open source community contributions. If we are to judge the company on its recent actions, the data shows what Satya Nadella said in his announcement about Microsoft being “all in on open source” is more than just words.
