Frank Karlitschek shares his open source wisdom and lessons from building Nextcloud.  In this episode, we touch on hot topics like the sovereign cloud, avoiding cloud lock in, building and growing a successful bootstrapped open source company, dealing with consumers and large enterprises, and more! Frank has been in the open source industry for many years and has a unique perspective on what works and what doesn't.  This is episode 16 of the Hacking Open Source Business Podcast!

In this episode:

• 00:00:00 Coming up next on the podcast: VC Expectations
• 00:00:47 Intro: Welcome Frank, CEO of Nextcloud
• 00:01:39 Learning about Nextcloud
• 00:02:44 Branding as the open source version of X
• 00:03:43 Where did you get the idea for Nextcloud?
• 00:04:57 Business or Project? What was the end goal?
• 00:06:13 Deciding on business, pricing, & support models
• 00:08:03 Figuring out the core demographic, planning for growth, and sometimes getting it wrong
• 00:09:17 Why is the sovereign cloud important
• 00:11:05 The first contributor, accelerating contributions, and hiring contributors
• 00:12:29 100% bootstrapped, no external investors
• 00:14:07 How do big organizations or governments affect the roadmap for an open source project?
• 00:16:22 Lessons learned from dealing both with consumers and businesses
• 00:17:36 What advice would you tell your younger self? Don't accept the way things are!
• 00:20:15 How do you decentralize the cloud?
• 00:21:36 Cloud lock-in
• 00:22:25 Rapid Fire Questions!
• 00:23:01 Favorite open source tool
• 00:23:21 First Linux distro
• 00:24:27 Conference walk up music
• 00:25:36 Favorite beverage
• 00:26:27 What is new and exciting in the open source space
• 00:27:38 Thoughts on AI & Copilot
• 00:29:39 Favorite food
• 00:30:01 Thank you!

Checkout our other interviews, clips, and videos:  https://www.youtube.com/@opensourcebusiness

Don’t forget to visit the open source business community at:  https://opensourcemetrics.org/

Visit our primary sponsor, Scarf, for tools to help analyze your #opensource growth and adoption:   https://about.scarf.sh/

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#opensource #business #metrics #businessmetrics #foss #podcast

Checkout our other interviews, clips, and videos: https://l.hosbp.com/Youtube

Don’t forget to visit the open-source business community at: https://opensourcebusiness.community/

Visit our primary sponsor, Scarf, for tools to help analyze your #opensource growth and adoption: https://about.scarf.sh/

Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app:
Spotify: https://l.hosbp.com/Spotify
Apple: https://l.hosbp.com/Apple
Google: https://l.hosbp.com/Google
Buzzsprout: https://l.hosbp.com/Buzzsprout