Costa Tsaousis, Netdata’s founder and CEO, joined a panel at SREcon23 Americas on October 11, 2023 in San Francisco. The session, “Open-source Development as a Full-time Pursuit,” ran from 16:50 to 17:30 and brought together maintainers who build open-source infrastructure tooling as their day job – not as a side project.
The panel dug into the realities of sustaining an open-source project when it is also the foundation of a company. Topics included funding models, the tension between community contributions and product roadmap, and the practical challenge of keeping a project healthy when you have both volunteer contributors and a paid engineering team pulling in potentially different directions.
SREcon is a USENIX event, so the audience skews toward experienced site reliability engineers who have opinions about their tools. For Netdata, it was a chance to talk about the decisions behind building monitoring software in the open – what you gain in trust and adoption, and what it costs in terms of development velocity and coordination.