Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Non-DevTool Open Source  ## Metadata - Author: [[Emily Omier]] - Full Title: Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Non-DevTool Open Source - Category: #articles - Document Note: - tags: - #OpenSource - #BusinessModels - #CommunityBuilding Author: Emily Omier Source: The New Stack Reference: https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-non-developer-tool-open-source-companies/ date created: 2025-08-23 00:00 # Title: Exploring Open Source Companies Beyond DevTools ## Table of Contents: - 🔗 [📝 Summary](#-summary) - 🔗 [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - 🔗 [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - 🔗 [📖 References](#-references) - 🔗 [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - 🔗 [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - 🔗 [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - 🔗 [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - 🔗 [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - 🔗 [❓ Questions](#-questions) - 🔗 [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - 🔗 [💡 Implications](#-implications) - 🔗 [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - 🔗 [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - 🔗 [🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging) Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - 🔗 [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - 🔗 [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - 🔗 [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - 🔗 [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: Include a list of sources consulted and cited in the article. - The New Stack column “Entrepreneurship for Engineers” by Emily Omier - Interviews and quotes: Frank Karlitschek (Nextcloud), Birthe Lindenthal (OpenProject), Justin Simpson (Artefactual) ## 📝 Summary: The article argues that financially successful open source companies do exist outside DevTools, though they’re less visible. For non-DevTool products, open source drives adoption among non-developer communities, improves product feedback, and builds trust—especially with governments and security-sensitive sectors—through transparency and auditability. These companies often achieve strong community contributions, including upstream work from paying customers. Open source isn’t universally optimal; it requires a clear engineering, product, community, and marketing strategy, and tends to work best when products serve both personal and professional use cases. ## 📖 Main Content: - Open source beyond DevTools - Success exists but is less conspicuous (“narwhals, not unicorns”). - Benefits for users, companies, and communities apply at the application layer too. - Adoption and user feedback - Open source catalyzes grassroots adoption among non-developers (e.g., archivists). - Large user bases generate abundant inbound interest but require lead qualification. - Community input guides feature prioritization and testing. - Trust and transparency - Governments and regulated industries prefer auditable code. - Open source branding combats “extractive vendor” perceptions and enables more collaborative vendor–customer dynamics. - Contributions - Non-DevTool OSS can garner robust contributions from volunteers and customers alike. - Public administrations may fund features and upstream code back. - Ecosystems expand through translations, plugins, and integrations. - Fit assessment - Open source demands cohesive strategies across engineering, product, community, and marketing. - Dual personal/professional appeal correlates with stronger communities. - It’s not universally right, but can suit many non-infrastructure products. ### 🗒️ Notes - Visibility and framing - “Narwhals, not unicorns”: successful OSS firms exist but are under-recognized. - Application-layer OSS is less common than infra, but benefits are similar. - Adoption mechanics - Grassroots deployment without vendor involvement (e.g., 400 Indonesian archives) demonstrates frictionless scale. - Inbound volume vs. quality trade-off: high awareness, lower qualified lead percentage. - Community testing shortens feedback loops and improves prioritization. - Trust vectors - Auditability matters to governments/defense/healthcare/banking. - OSS signals mission alignment; tempers adversarial vendor relationships. - Contribution patterns - Enterprise users contributing code/integrations; public bodies funding features that are upstreamed. - Volunteer networks (e.g., 2,000+ for Nextcloud) extend capacity beyond payroll. - Strategic prerequisites - Need aligned strategies: engineering roadmap, product discovery, community stewardship, and go-to-market. - Personal/professional use cases foster network effects and identity-based communities. - OSS isn’t mandatory; proprietary can fit when strategy/product-market fit dictates. ## 📖 References: - The New Stack: Entrepreneurship for Engineers column by Emily Omier - Nextcloud, OpenProject, Artefactual public materials and talks (as quoted) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea: “Financially successful open source companies are narwhals, not unicorns.” - Paraphrase: Profitable OSS companies are real but often submerged from view—rarely spotlighted despite their presence. 2) Original idea: “Open source can be beneficial if you have a clear strategy across engineering, product, community, and marketing.” - Paraphrase: The OSS model pays off when a coordinated plan spans the codebase, feature planning, community cultivation, and market positioning. ## 📰 Newsletter: This week in Web Dev and Open Source: - Learn: Brush up your fundamentals with approachable guides on modern PHP, JavaScript modules, semantic HTML, and CSS container queries. For version control mastery, revisit branching strategies and GitHub Actions workflows. - Updates: WordPress continues its march with performance-focused improvements and a growing library of block patterns. Keep an eye on sustainability initiatives emerging across OSS projects. - Community: Shoutout to contributors localizing plugins and refining accessibility in themes—your PRs keep the ecosystem thriving. - New plugins: Explore tools that streamline editor workflows, performance monitoring, and multilingual support. Vet performance with real-user metrics before rollout. - Read: Why non-DevTool OSS thrives—open source boosts adoption, trust, and upstream contributions, especially for public sector users. The lesson for WordPress builders: transparency and community-first roadmaps convert fans into co-creators. Links: - Learn GitHub Actions: https://docs.github.com/actions - WordPress Performance Team updates: https://make.wordpress.org/performance/ - On trust and auditability in OSS: https://nextcloud.com/blog/ ## ✅ Action Items: Purpose-built prompt for aligning each article with your Developer Advocate and future OSPO goals: “Analyze the supplied article through the lens of: - Open-source advocacy: Identify how the piece advances transparency, auditability, and community governance. Extract arguments I can use in talks with enterprise, public sector, and WordPress stakeholders. - Contributor engagement: Map concrete mechanisms (docs, issues, mentorship, funding) that increased adoption, feedback loops, and upstreaming. Propose WordPress-ready playbooks to replicate these patterns. - Education and onboarding: Derive curricula or workshops for new contributors (PHP/JS/HTML/CSS/Git/GitHub) tied to the article’s examples. Include lesson objectives, hands-on labs, and assessment rubrics. - Sustainable funding: Highlight funding models (sponsorships, public procurement, support contracts) and suggest how to integrate them into WordPress’s ecosystem while preserving openness. - OSPO readiness: Translate insights into OSPO policies: code audit practices, contribution guidelines, CLA/DCO choices, compliance, SBOMs, and DEIB-aligned community standards. - Transparency and inclusivity: Recommend communication cadences (roadmaps, changelogs, public RFCs), inclusive language, and governance participation pathways. - Speaking and content plan: Outline talks, workshops, and posts connecting the article’s lessons to WordPress, emphasizing measurable outcomes (new contributors onboarded, upstream PRs merged, adoption in gov/edu).” Deliverables: 1) a one-page alignment brief, 2) a 90-day action plan, 3) slide outline for a WordCamp/session, 4) contributor onboarding checklist. How this article aligns: - Advocacy: Strong case for auditability and trust with governments/security-sens - Summary: In this article, the author explores the world of open source companies that focus on non-developer tools. While developer tools are often associated with open source companies, there are successful open source companies in other domains as well. These companies choose to go open source to drive adoption, gain user feedback, and establish trust and transparency with their customers. They also benefit from code contributions from both volunteers and paying customers. However, the decision to go open source should be based on a clear strategy and consideration of the project's potential for personal and professional use. - URL: https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-non-developer-tool-open-source-companies/  Entrepreneurship for Engineers is a [monthly column](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-a-post-layoff-startup/) by longtime New Stack contributor [Emily Omier](https://thenewstack.io/author/emily-omier/) that explores the concerns of developers who want to build tools for other developers — and build a business around their innovations. We welcome your feedback and ideas for future columns. In spaces where people talk about [open source companies,](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-open-source-business-models/) whether it’s at conferences or in publications like this one, people tend to focus on [developer tools.](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-build-a-painkiller-or-vitamin-product/) There are, of course, plenty of developer tool companies that are also open source companies, and many of the really well-known examples, like [Red Hat](https://www.openshift.com/try?utm_content=inline-mention) or [pre-license-change](https://thenewstack.io/hashicorp-abandons-open-source-for-business-source-license/) [HashiCorp](https://www.hashicorp.com/?utm_content=inline-mention), are DevTools. But financially successful open source companies are narwhals, not unicorns: They actually exist, but spend a lot of time going undetected below the surface. “It’s true that it’s a bit more rare in the application layer,” said [Frank Karlitschek](https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankkarlitschek/), CEO and founder of Nextcloud, about the fact that there are more open source companies in, for example, the software infrastructure space. “I don’t really know why, to be honest, because the benefits are very similar — the benefits for the users and for the company and the community.” Let’s shine some light on the world of open source companies that don’t necessarily sell to developers — and why they still think an open source business is the right way to build their particular company. #### Adoption and User Feedback Just like for developer tools, one of the reasons that a non-DevTool startup might choose to go open source is to drive adoption. It’s just that the communities adopting the project are not developers. [Justin Simpson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-h-simpson/), managing director at Artefactual, an open source company that makes digital preservation and archiving software, said at a conference recently he spoke with someone from Indonesia who had used one of Artefactual’s projects to create an automated way for any small community to build a web-based archive. There are about 400 of these websites around Indonesia, all created without Artefactual’s knowledge. “The same things have happened in places like Brazil and Spain,” Simpson said. “We’re working with a community of users who are, by definition, conservative, like people who work in archives are not typically on the leading edge of things. So when they see hundreds of organizations using the software, they are more likely to be our customer.” Karlitschek said his company gets a lot of inbound leads every day. “Our open source strategy means we are very, very well known,” he said. “We have millions of users all over the world.” This doesn’t mean he just shakes money from the tree, however — the quality of the leads tends to be lower, because a lot of these potential customers can’t actually afford [to pay for services and support](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-selling-open-source-software/) from NextCloud. “We really have to spend a lot of energy in the qualification phase in the sales cycle,” he said. For OpenProject, an open-source project management company, having an open source project means getting excellent feedback about the product, knowing what new features to prioritize and help with testing the product, according to [Birthe Lindenthal](https://www.linkedin.com/in/birthe-lindenthal/), the organization’s co-founder and CMO. #### Trust and Transparency There are a lot of ways an organization has to trust their software vendors, and being an open source company helps in more than one way. First of all, all of the three founders interviewed for this article sell to governments — which is not a coincidence. Governments tend to be especially paranoid about security, and the ability to audit the code themselves is important to security-conscious organizations, whether the software is a DevTool or a human resources tool. “We have a lot of paying customers in areas that are very security sensitive,” said Karlitschek. “From governments to defense, to healthcare and banking, all these customers really like that, with Nextcloud, you can audit the code, you can look inside, you can check if there are backdoors.” There are other types of trust, too. For Artefactual’s customers, Simpson said, being an open source company is a critical part of the company’s branding, and it signals that the company doesn’t just exist to make a buck. “The academic research libraries, government archives, many of the people working with these organizations have had many bad experiences with vendors,” he said. “Being open source helps us to step outside of that.” Artefactual is still a vendor, of course, but using open source software is a differentiator and makes the relationship seem less adversarial for customers. #### Contributions This might be ironic, but non-DevTool open source companies are at least as successful at getting code contributions for their projects as DevTool companies are, whether in the form of completely volunteer contributions or customers who pay them but also contribute actively to the open source project. “We have huge clients who actually have employees who are working on OpenProject or who are developing integrations to the back end of OpenProject,” Lindenthal said. “Also, especially within the public administrations, they pay us for further developers of the software, and they always give the source code, like in terms of upstream contributions, back to the community. So this is like a real open source ecosystem.” Nextcloud also counts on volunteers to improve the project — in many ways. The company employs about 90 people, Karlitschek said, “but we have a community of over 2000 volunteers.” And that’s not even counting things like translations and plugins, all of which contribute to the Nextcloud ecosystem. #### Is Open Source the Right Choice? [Open source](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-from-open-source-to-monetization-profit/) still isn’t the right fit for every technology company. “There is a space for proprietary,” Karlitscheck said. “You need to have a clear strategy, like engineering, [product development strategy,](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-achieving-product-led-growth/) community strategy and [marketing strategy](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-do-engineers-hate-marketing/) — if you have that, then open source can be beneficial.” One criterion Karlitschek recommended is thinking about whether a project has both a personal and professional use, because those types of projects are most likely to be successful at [building a community](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-how-to-build-a-community/). So [is open source right for your startup?](https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-selling-open-source-software/) It depends. But an open source approach can be a good fit even for companies that don’t fit the stereotype of an infrastructure tool for experienced platform engineers., Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Non-DevTool Open Source, Emily Omier, 01hcj3yqz363w9amr54558gcr3.