Testing 17 different income streams with Per Ploug Krogslund

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Per Ploug Krogslund, who is currently senior director of developer programs at Docker, and who previously had a number of experiences at the intersection of open source and business. He founded and ran an open source company, Umbraco, for many years, and also led the Open Source Program Office at Spotify.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about open source businesses. Some of the topics we covered:

• What is the right size for an open source business? How do we make space in the conversation about open source businesses for the companies that will never become billion dollar unicorns?
• The tension, both internal and external, around building open source software and building a company. We talked about this in the context of Umbraco and in the context of Docker — most fascinating to me was that Per felt like as soon as Umbraco had figured this out, it wasn’t as interesting for him to keep working on the company.
• Why hasn’t there been an “enterprise Backstage” company to spin out of Spotify?
• We also revisited the question of Microsoft and open source, because Umbraco is an open source company built on a Microsoft stack at a time when Microsoft was publicly hostile to open source.

What should you take away from this conversation?

• There are plenty of opportunities to build small-to-medium size companies around open source
• You might have to try a lot of different ways to monetize. Per said he felt like Umbraco tested 17 different income streams
• There will be a tension, both internally and externally, about how much to open source. This is part of the game; you have to figure out how to manage this tension but might never feel like you get it perfect.

If you’re listening and want help on your open source strategy, finding the right balance between open source and income streams and figuring out what those income streams should be, reach out to see if it might be a good fit for us to work together.