Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2024

schedule

20 Years of Open Source building XWiki and CryptPad


This talk is about our Journey as an Open Source creator, project maintainer and company, from being alone creating the Open Source software XWiki and the associated company, to the first users and contributors, first hires, first clients, growing the company over the years to more than 50 people, fully bootstrapped. It is about the struggles to compete with proprietary software and then having customers asking to transition from their provider forcing them to a 5x more expensive offer. It is about creating a new product CryptPad and running 2 open source communities and our journey providing a privacy protecting software. It is about licenses and the temptation to close some code to be able to be more successful and finally finding other ways. It is about the joys of building Open Source together as a team, how you meet other FOSS people, at FOSDEM, in local communities or in business conferences, and collaborate and share your passion and beliefs. It is about Digital Sovereignty. It's also about what we could have done differently if we knew. It is about how you can live from Open Source, while respecting your contributors, your users , your customers and your employees. I hope this talk, sharing our experience will help other FOSS lovers be able also to live from Open Source and push them to move to full time Open Source. As for many companies, our story is somewhat a roller coaster with its set of successes and failures. Open Source success takes time, but good things can come for those who are resilient enough.

Speakers

Photo of Ludovic Dubost Ludovic Dubost

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