The Business of Open Source18 Dec 2024

Maintaining Control of your Brand with Ramiro Berrelleza

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have a special episode recorded on-site at KubeCon NA this fall, with Ramiro Berrelleza, the CEO of Okteto.

We kicked off the conversation with a discussion about branding. Okteto is the name of the company, the name of the project and the name of the product. We started this conversation because it had been a big part of conversations I had with other founders at KubeCon. Most interesting to me was that while Ramiro explained how that decision was made, he said he was 50% happy with it, 50% not. Which is about the same as what I hear from founders who have made the opposite decision — so maybe there is just no ideal way to approach branding.

Some other things we discussed:

What’s the different from fully embracing open source versus just having an OSI-approved license
Not donating the project to the CNCF specifically because he wanted to maintain control over the brand; a decision he thinks was a correct one.
The specifics of developer marketing, and especially how sometimes developer marketing can be a mix of B2B marketing and B2C.
The tensions between the needs and desires of individual users and the needs and desires of their employers.

Ramiro and I are on the same wavelength about a couple of things; I particularly appreciated his distinction between users and customers.

We ended the conversation with a discussion of the benefits of open source companies — the opportunities that come from being open source that you can’t get any other way.

Having trouble taking full advantage of your open source project? You might want to work with me, and / or come to Open Source Founders Summit to chat with other open source founders.

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