Tobie Langel is Principal and Managing Partner at UnlockOpen, a consulting firm in Geneva that advises clients on working with the open tech ecosystem. Langel is a passionate advocate for open source, and in February, he gave a presentation at the­ State of Open Conference in London urging funding for open source maintainers.

Here, he discusses the distinction between open source development and open source maintenance, why open source sustainability issues persist and why $1 billion or even $10 billion per year isn't too much to ask of the global tech industry to fund open source maintenance -- especially in an age of vulnerabilities such as log4shell and ongoing software supply chain attacks.

Bruce Perens created the definition of open source and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He has said in recent public interviews, however, that open source has failed, and called for its overhaul under his Post-Open project. In this episode, Beth caught up with him to hear more about his ideas for the world after open source.

Adam Jacob is CEO and co-founder of System Initiative, an infrastructure automation software startup that came out of stealth in 2023. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Chef Software, which also focused on infrastructure automation, and was sold to Progress Software in 2020. Chef had roots in open source, and underwent a license change in 2019; Jacob has taken a different tack with his new company.

In this episode, he discusses his "speed run" through the various permutations of open source business models during his career, and how the industry can use the lessons learned by a generation of open product entrepreneurs to improve open source-based business sustainability.