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.