My Passion for Open Source is Commercial

I’ve been passionate about the business of open source for nearly three decades. I’ve always wanted to understand why certain open-source projects compound into enduring companies, while others fade into GitHub trivia.

This week I attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2025. Here’s what I learned..

Community Momentum Beats Every Metric You’ve Been Taught

Let’s start with the obvious truth most investors still ignore: community momentum is the only reliable leading indicator in open source.

Revenue? A lagging metric. Customer logos? Marketing output. GitHub stars? Vanity. The real signal hides in the base of active users. Sometimes contributor velocity is a sign of community momentum—especially end-user contributions. That’s the closest thing this market has to insider information.

Take Backstage, an open source project led by Spotify. Long before “platform engineering” became a buzzword, Backstage was quietly racking up end-user commits from Fortune 500 teams. That’s not hype—that’s proof of necessity. When your customers are fixing your bugs for you, you’ve achieved gravitational pull. Same with Argo CD: contributor growth foreshadowed its near-total dominance in GitOps. The people closest to the pain built the solution, and the market followed.

The Smart Money Hides in the Weird Niches

Every tourist in cloud native wants to circle Kubernetes. It’s big, it’s shiny, and it feels safe. But the truth is, the best returns are probably no longer next to the flagship—they’re in the weird corners where incumbents don’t bother looking.

Big platforms breed competition and margin compression. Specialized niches breed moats. Look at Crossplane and Cilium: both solved painfully specific problems (multi-cloud control planes, Kubernetes networking) with deep technical leverage and zero early competition. That gave Upbound and Isovalent time to build businesses before the hyperscalers even woke up.

If it feels too niche to matter, that’s often your entry point. By the time everyone “gets it,” you’re priced out.

Mature Projects Win Through the Ecosystem Play

Once a project hits ubiquity, the tech risk disappears—but so does the easy growth. The trick then is not to out-innovate the core; it’s to monetize the surrounding chaos. That’s the ecosystem play.

Kubernetes did it first. Red Hat, Rancher, and every cloud provider turned it into gold by selling what enterprises actually buy—support, integration, security, and simplicity. Prometheus spawned Chronosphere. Argo and Flux fueled Akuity and Codefresh. The pattern repeats because it works: the open core builds trust; the ecosystem captures dollars.

For investors, this is the lowest-risk bet in the open-source stack: technology already proven, market already educated.

The only thing left to test is execution.