Startups With Open Source Projects: Can They Be Successful in the CNCF? And Should They Be?

The CNCF hosts a wide variety of open source projects, not just in functionality but in the nature of the maintainers and funders behind the project. Some projects are backed by multiple large companies, including public companies with trillion-dollar market caps. Some are backed by single small startups with a small fraction of the resources. And some projects fall somewhere in between. But all share one fact: the vast majority of contributions are done by paid maintainers.

For startups in the CNCF ecosystem, is it possible to be successful delivering a CNCF open source project? Or is this strategy a fundamentally un-monetizable one? And from the perspective of the cloud native community, is it actually important for startups to be successful in this community? Or should the CNCF primarily focus on projects that are more like Kubernetes itself—backed by well-established companies with the resources and longevity to keep their projects afloat indefinitely?

Hear from startup founders, project maintainers, and others in the thick of the struggle between commercialization and open source, between paying maintainers and appealing to the open source.