Open Source 2.0: The Maintainers' Perspective

Open source rules the world, and for a good reason: The code is generally better and more secure, bugs are fixed faster, and more. Virtually all modern applications run on it. But the landscape has changed since the early Linux days. Nights and weekends, volunteer-led projects are increasingly rare. Especially in the CNCF landscape, open source is maintained almost exclusively by companies that pursue a strategic goal, and they need a business justification for paying their engineers. So, who writes the code has changed, but the community's expectations — that it should be free — hasn't. While open source will remain free, the companies behind it must find ways to monetize it — whether through support, enterprise editions, or licensing models. Recent changes, including projects like Terraform, Flux, and Linkerd, highlight the need for a paradigm shift. During this panel, project maintainers discuss why that is and the future they envision.