Closed to Open Source Series: Doing Open Source "Right" with Ethan Arrowood

One of the myths that swirl around the open source company ecosystem is that all open source companies started as an open source project that then suddenly got traction, and followed by the founders frantically throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure out a business model.

In fact, this is not the story of how all open source companies came to exist.

It is not at all uncommon for a company to start the open source project with the explicit goal of building a company around it, and it also isn’t uncommon for a company that started as a closed source company to open source a portion of their codebase, for a variety of reasons.

This episode is about that second scenario. It’s the first in a series about how Harper went from a closed-source company to an open source company, including both the why and the how of the transition.

Today I talked with Ethan Arrowood, head of open source engineering at Harper. We’ll get his perspective on the transition from closed to open source today, and another perspective next time.

We talked about things like why Harper wasn’t open source from the very beginning, how Harper doesn’t fit the stereotype of an open source company in that they started with enterprise adoption, not individual developers using the platform, and the decision to go open source went hand in hand with the desire to focus on community building. We also had a conversation about the difference between being open source in name and really following the spirit of open source, and why there are business benefits to doing open source ‘right.’