The Open Source Founders Summit is a 'business conference, not a technology conference'
Paris event enters its second year
Welcome to Forkable’s COSS Corner column, where I profile startups and key figures from the commercial open source software (COSS) space.
In this edition, I check in with Emily Omier, open source company consultant and host of the Business of Open Source podcast; and Remy Bertot, co-founder and CTO of open source password management platform Passbolt.
In 2024, Omier and Bertot joined forces to launch the inaugural Open Source Founders Summit (OSFS), an event aimed squarely at — you guessed it — open source company founders. As we approach the second installment of the OSFS, scheduled for Paris next week (May 19-20), I wanted to find out a little more about the event, including its evolution and how it’s looking to set itself apart from the myriad other open source-aligned events out there.
Read the interview with Omier and Bertot below.
‘A business conference’
Anyone who even remotely follows the open source “industry” will be aware of the multitude of conferences that exist in the domain. In the past few months alone I’ve attended the State of Open Con and KubeCon / CloudNativeCon in London; throw into the mix the Linux Foundation’s various regional Open Source Summits, FOSDEM, All Things Open, OpenSearchCon, and all the other broad and niche events, then you can appreciate that “open source” is fairly well covered in terms of global gatherings.
Although these kinds of events will often dedicate some exposure to the business side of open source, they typically focus more on the technology, or perhaps the community-management side of things, rather than the pain-points faced by commercial open source companies specifically.
“I go to a lot of open source conferences, and while there would sometimes be a ‘business’ track, it was at best full of entry-level talks — think ‘open source business models’,” Omier explained. “There was no place for in-depth discussions about what makes open source businesses different, and never anything that I thought would be useful to my clients, who are by definition ‘experienced’ in open source businesses, because they have been running an open source business for at least some time.”
And so that is where the OSFS enters the fray — it’s a “business conference, not a technology conference,” as Omier puts it.
Bertot, who founded Passbolt in 2016 and which recently closed a $8 million Series A round of funding, says that conversations around business and leadership at open source conferences often happen informally “in the hallway between talks,” whereas OSFS pushes the matter front and center.
“With OSFS, we wanted to create a dedicated space for founders to engage in deeper conversations about the business side of open source, similar to the environment you’d find in an incubator or accelerator,” Bertot explained. “It’s not about pitching your project or business, it’s about having a candid, supportive dialogue among leaders facing similar challenges.”
While ticket sales are now closed for the 2025 edition, the OSFS is fairly selective about who gets to attend anyway: it’s not about cramming in as many people as they can, and it’s heavily curated. Those in attendance are likely to be founders or others “in high-level leadership” at an open source company; and the focus is very much on learning, rather than selling products, which is why you’ll be unlikely to encounter any journalists or investors there.
“We don’t want the event to become too big, there is a size limit after which it becomes impersonal,” Bertot said. “We want people to make meaningful connections, and I’m not sure this can happen with more than 100 people. This year, we’re also making a more targeted effort to involve smaller startups, so they can learn from more established founders.”
Among those scheduled to attend this year are Amandine Le Pape, co-founder and CEO of Element, the company behind the Matrix communication protocol; John O’Nolan, founder and CEO of open source publishing platform Ghost; Anna Widenius, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation; and Jonathan Ellis, co-founder of Datastax, an Apache Cassandra-based NoSQL database recently acquired by IBM.
The conference has also secured some notable sponsors: in addition to Omier and Bertot’s own respective businesses, backers include the Open Source Initiative (OSI), Eclipse Foundation, YottaDB, and a company you’ve probably heard of before — Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Workshopping
The OSFS essentially brings together people with a similar problem set — something you might not get in a more general conference context. For instance, the Founders Therapy workshop invites attendees to come with real-world challenges they’ve faced, where they can bounce ideas off each other and share possible solutions.
“The Founders Therapy session was really popular [last year], and there seems to be a big need among open source founders just to be among others who understand the specifics of open source businesses,” Omier said.
In addition to moving to a new venue (@ La Rotonde Stalingrad, Paris), the 2025 edition will make a few tweaks to last year’s schedule, essentially based on feedback received.
“We had overwhelmingly positive feedback last year, which is why we decided to continue,” Omier continued. “This year we’ve put a bigger focus on the interactive workshops, because that was everyone’s favorite part of the event last year. The workshops are longer and there are more of them.”
The conference now has its very own legal home, too, in the form of the Open Source Founders Association, which serves a secondary purpose for those not necessarily attending the main summit itself. For €199 a year, members can access a year-round network, and receive discounts and priority access to any future events. What such events might look like isn’t yet clear — it could be semi-regular virtual meetups, and become a place for open source founders to collaborate throughout the year. Omier also suggested it could eventually host tangential initiatives, such as a job board for open source companies.
Bertot is also keen to expand things beyond the core annual summit, though he conceded that time could prove a barrier initially.
“Personally, I’m keen on trying new initiatives like establishing cross-promotion between projects, or a mentorship program, pairing early-stage startups with more experienced founders or connecting early startups to equity-free accelerator programs — or programs to help them apply to European grants,” Bertot said. “However, given that both Emily and I have other primary commitments, it will take some time to build that out, so we’ll start small.”