Open source as a business strategy

Open source is one of the most powerful go-to-market strategies in developer tools, and one of the most misunderstood. I learned this building Chef.

Developers trust tools they can read, modify, and contribute to. Chef grew into one of the largest open-source communities in infrastructure software, adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM. The community became our superpower. Marketing spend does not replicate that.

The founding thesis was to open up the tools that Google, Amazon, and a few others kept as closely guarded secrets. We founded Opscode and created Chef to bring serious infrastructure automation to everyone. A bottoms-up approach worked. Developers adopted the tool because it solved their problem, and enterprise deals followed when organizations realized their teams were already using it.

The hard part is the transition. The first time someone says “your documentation sucks” instead of improving the wiki, you know you have crossed from community to vendor. None of us want to be the shitty enterprise organization we created products to replace, and if you are successful that is your future. You get to make it suck less. You become what you disrupt.

Further reading

• Building Companies Developers Love — Heavybit, 2013
• Puppet, Chef Ease Transition to Cloud — Bloomberg Businessweek, 2012