Open Source Internal Startups with Saurav Pathak

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Saurav Pathak, chief product officier at Bagisto, about a very different kind of business relationship with open source — and open source software incubated in a larger company. There were tons of interesting nuggets in this episode, but some things I wanted to call out are:

• For open source projects, the tech stack that the project is built with can in fact be a differentiating feature. This is unique to open source (and has come up before, both in my consulting work and in podcast interviews). Users might want to choose a project because it’s written in the language they are familiar with, even if the functionality is exactly the same as a competing project
• The difference in needs between the merchants (who just want to get their ecommerce store up and running) and developers building ecommerce platforms, who was worried about being able to build extensions
• How an open source company like Bagisto fits into the larger commercial strategy for the parent company.
• Build a community of developers versus building a community of merchants, and why both are important for a project like Bagisto
• How Saurav manages the tension between adding features that people want and not building an overly bloated product, including how to manage this tension when someone wants to contribute a feature that the core team may or may not want.

It’s always interesting to me to see different models for open source companies, and Bagisto certainly is a different model. Especially after last week’s episode with Tanmai Gopal, which had a much more classic story.