The Future of Open Source - WAD World Congress Berlin 2024

When working on GitButler, we faced a common issue in the modern startup world. Open source the product or keep it closed and competitively safe? In a world of more developers growing up on open source, but also seeing source licensing and usage disputes like Hashicorp and Redis, how can a startup engage with it’s community like an Open Source project, yet protect itself from bad actors?

This talk explores the history of the Free Software and Open Source movements, the sea change in these communities that GitHub ushered in, the licensing options that companies like GitButler are adopting to try to bridge these issues, the future of Open Source software and how to make the source code of everything available to everyone.