On the latest episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Thabang is joined by Webtide CTO Greg Wilkins and CEO Jesse McConnell to discuss moving their technology to an open source foundation, finding a business model that stayed true to their initial goals, and embracing the “lifestyle company” label.
On the latest episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Thabang is joined by Webtide CTO Greg Wilkins and CEO Jesse McConnell to discuss moving their technology to an open source foundation, finding a business model that stayed true to their initial goals, and embracing the “lifestyle company” label.
Thabang Mashologu:
Hello again, and welcome to the Entrepreneurial Open Source podcast. A show where we discuss the power and practical value of open source in business and entrepreneurship with leaders and innovators from around the world. I'm Thabang Mashologu.
Thabang Mashologu:
We've got an amazing show lined up today. We're going to be speaking with Greg Wilkins and Jesse McConnell from Webtide, the creators of Eclipse Jetty, a web server that is used by millions of developers, and in production environments around the world. Jetty is found in commercial and open source products from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apache and the Eclipse IDE. Jesse is the CEO and Greg is the Chief Architect at Webtide. Welcome to the show, Greg and Jesse.
Greg Wilkins:
Gidday.
Jesse McConnell:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Thabang Mashologu:
Can you start by telling us a bit more about Webtide and how you got involved in the company? Maybe what's your origin story?
Greg Wilkins:
Oh, I'll go first. I've been with the company since it was founded in 1995, I guess was when I wrote Jetty as a submission to the Java contest. Java was a new language, 0.9 was out, so I wrote Jetty as a bit of infrastructure to support the application, which happened to be a issue tracker, which is submitted to that competition and happened to win it, Yay! And then from that time, that was 1995, Jetty's been an increasing part of my career as it used to be a background task, something I did in my spare time. But bit by bit, I introduced it into my clients as a contractor, and then started being able to hire people around it and building a business around it.
Greg Wilkins:
And I guess for the last 15 years at least, it's been the primary focus of our business, and we've grown to nine people around the world. And so as I grew the business, one of the best decisions I made was sacking myself as CEO and we hired on a CEO and now Jesse's in that role. And I remain as the CTO.
Jesse McConnell:
From my side of things, I got involved with Apache Maven a long time ago on the open source side of things. And then worked in a couple of the startups in that software, and I met Greg and Jan at one of the Java One's years ago. And then they needed someone on the US side of things to do work, Webtide, I think I was employee number four or something like that. And then I was engineer for that, and then Webtide was purchased by a company called Intalio. And we worked with them for a number of years. I was engineer, and sales, and that sort of thing inside of that, because I'm sure we'll get to it later, but from a business perspective, technical sales, is really the only way that you can do anything with this technology.
Jesse McConnell:
Then we had the opportunity to buy Webtide out ourselves, back in 2015, and we've been 100% developer-owned and operated since then. It's been a heck of a ride, and we're very successful, we're very happy with what like to term a lifestyle company.
Thabang Mashologu:
That's very cool. Can you expand on that? In what ways are you a lifestyle company?
Jesse McConnell:
Well, we're up to nine around the world right now. Being 100% developed-owned and operated means that Jetty and CometD, which is another project that we work on, are basically the entirety of what we do. It's a lifestyle in that, the work that we do, the clients that we work with, fully fund both the ongoing development of the open source projects. But then it also puts food in all of our mouths as well. That's where the lifestyle comes from. It's not a typical VC 10x return type company. It is a small manageable company that employs nine people around the world, and has lots of families and kids, and all that stuff. It takes care of all of us.
Greg Wilkins:
And I guess it adheres to the principle, there was a book, The Mythical Man-Month, that came out. And that book said there are some jobs that can't be done by more than 10 or less than 100 people. And so we're in that little comfort zone, just below 10. If we were to grow more than that, we'd probably have to grow to 100 people to justify the business. The lifestyle company comes from the CFO of the company that had acquired us and sold it back to us. And when he sold it back to us, he said it as pejorative, and we embraced it as "Yeah!"
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, and also bonus points for working the mythical man-month into your answer.
Greg Wilkins:
One of my favorite books. It's definitely one of my favorites.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, no doubt. Can we delve into the operating and business model at Webtide? How do you go about helping organizations solve problems? And how do you monetize that?
Jesse McConnell:
In a nutshell, we are a very services oriented company. One of the big differences I guess, in how Webtide is structured, and our relationship with Jetty, is that where traditional open source companies have tried to monetize things, is they've taken an open source project, and then they've tried to wrap it in some way into something that could be sold as a production support type thing. Either relicense it, expand it a bit, add some number of features that would be compelling for somebody, offer a different release schedule or something like that. Patching schedules, those kinds of things.
Jesse McConnell:
And we really did not want to go that direction. We tried similarish type things in the past. But ultimately, any of that kind of activity took us away from the core principles of what we wanted to work on, which was Jetty, and open source, and things like that. What we ended up doing was hitting upon a model where our product is basically advice. When you enter into what we call a lifecycle subscription, it is a yearly subscription that some number of developers within your organization have access to a private messaging repository, or these days it's a private GitHub repository, where some number of developers are able to ask unlimited, unmetered questions directly to the developers of Jetty.
Jesse McConnell:
There is no junior developer, there is no tiers of support. It's a direct one-on-one relationship between the engineers of company A and Webtide. From a deeply technical nature, because Jetty itself, is not really a traditional product. It's a technology, it's an application server, it's web servers, it's a servlet engine, newer protocols, all those kinds of things. So we don't really have a common off-the-shelf product that company A will come in and say, "We want X widgets of this, and we want some support on it." It's an advice-only subscription. They ask us questions, and if they come across a bug inside of Jetty, then we fix it in the open source version, we rerelease it in the open source version, so everybody benefits.
Greg Wilkins:
We call it lifecycle support, because we don't like to think of it as insurance that you can call us when something goes wrong, which sure, our clients can call us. We have service level agreements and occasionally, we'll get the call in the middle of the night that something has disastrously gone wrong. But it's more that we want to be involved to avoid those problems in the first place. What I mean, involved in the whole lifecycle of the projects.
Greg Wilkins:
We're involved as they develop it, how they use the project, and therefore, we give the advice to avoid the problems before they happen. And that's much more rewarding to our developers, because we're not just fighting fires all the time, we're involved in the development of interesting new ideas. And it's also more rewarding for our customers, because they don't get big problems in the first place. And that folds back into how we developed our product and our company around the product.
Greg Wilkins:
Because the focus of Jetty is not standardization. We don't want to stamp out a fixed product, which we can then train 100 certified Jetty engineers that we can then put a big price tag on and drop them into corporate X. I mean, that's a big business model that can work, if you're going for the standardized approach of the server. "It must be used this way, this is the Jetty way of doing things." And you can grow a good business around that by training people how to do it the Jetty way.
Greg Wilkins:
We're the other way round. We like to think that we're a very flexible good software component and we get used, I mean the classic example is Google App Engine. Google App Engine could've used any servlet server they liked, except for they wanted to have their own authentication in there, their own session management, their own levels of persistence. And we're very flexible about the way we can be configured and change. They were able to take it, pull out the bits they don't like, and put in their own bit, and enhance it a lot.
Greg Wilkins:
And that style of usage, just doesn't go with the certified Jetty engineer that we could spend a year training them and giving them ring binders full of how to use Jetty, and they'd turn up to try and help a client like that. And it's like, "Well, this is nothing like what I saw in my training." So that's why the direct core developers in Jetty, to the core developers of the application, is a very important relationship.
Thabang Mashologu:
Got you. Now what would you say are the specific benefits and advantages of Jetty that have contributed to the growth in its use and adoption by developers and customers?
Greg Wilkins:
Well firstly, it's open source, so if you use it, you're not dependent on any closed source stuff. You can see how it works, and I guess the key thing is, that we've always made ourselves a very small footprint, so we don't take up too many resources. We're highly scalable, we'll handle a large amount of load. We adopt standards, so we avoid doing anything proprietary. We do have a few special Jetty APIs, but when we do them, the first thing we try and do is get them incorporated into the standards, so that just by using Jetty, doesn't mean you're locked in to us, you can change to other standards based web servers. We want to use us, because you want to use us, not because you've got legacy tie in to us, and it's too difficult for you to change.
Greg Wilkins:
And so the fact that we have embraced those standards, and it's easy to sort this out for another implementation of those standards, yet we still have people who use us, is a testament that that works. But I guess there is some type, you know, locking in terms of there are a large number of customers that use us because we are flexible away from the standards. If you don't want to use the standard session management, if you don't want to use the standard persistence, we can just pull out those modules and put in new ones, and it's all seamless. It integrates with everything else.
Greg Wilkins:
We spent a lot of effort to make sure that while we implement the standards, and those standards have an effect across the board, we don't do hard dependencies on them. Just because we can support the EE identity propagation, it doesn't mean you have to use that. You can use other ways of doing things also.
Jesse McConnell:
One of the reasons that Jetty is so often loved in the developer community, is because it's so easy to embed. You can add a couple dependencies to whatever your built system is, and in just three or four lines of Java code, you can have a Jetty server with all of the benefits of scalability and all that kind of stuff, right inside of your own application. That has led to a lot of different usage scenarios of Jetty.
Thabang Mashologu:
And can you give us a sense of what all of those usage scenarios, and the broad adoption of Jetty has meant to your sales and marketing?
Greg Wilkins:
It's changed very much over the years, kind of the way that open source has changed. In the very early days of Jetty, we would get people who were adopting it, not because it was open source. Open source wasn't very well-known, it just had capabilities that weren't available elsewhere. And to be frank, I was running a software consulting business, I would get hired for my expertise in solving problems, and in my toolbox that I brought along was Jetty. And I would pitch it to clients and they would end up using it. The open source side of things was picking up, people were using it anyway. But they weren't necessarily clients. The clients we got were people that were contacting us for our consulting abilities, as opposed to our software abilities.
Greg Wilkins:
Then as the open source steamroller got bigger and bigger, we started having a lot of small-medium clients that would come to us with, "I've got his startup idea. I've got some venture capital. I'm doing this wacky thing on the web. We need your web server to do this." And there were all small companies that you'd never heard of, and they would come to us and ask for some innovation, or some advice on how to make the server do their special use case. We went for a lot of years with those guys being our primary market, and it was very much they would come to us.
Greg Wilkins:
Then while that was happening, the big guys just slowly naturally adopted Jetty and started using it in their infrastructure, and initially, none of them really engaged us to support it. They have all the smartest guys in the room, and big budgets, and they were able to self-support. And so they embraced it, because it was open-source, and they didn't actually have to ask. They just started using it. But then over the years, I guess they've realized several things. That if they want open source projects to exist, they have to give back to the commons.
Greg Wilkins:
Some of our larger clients, it's very much they reached out after a time and said, "Well no, we are using this software. We should give back to it, contribute to it, and make sure it goes." And so they reached out and established a relationship with us. Maybe a little bit of door-knocking, but occasionally that door was very easy to knock in. Although we made contacts easily on a technical level, sometimes it's hard to get up to the contract level, or the business level.
Greg Wilkins:
But then also, I guess there's the while we've been around 25 years, there's now a little bit of a legacy aspect there as well, where there's companies who've got Jetty deeply embedded in their core and important infrastructure, and they do reviews of that, and they go, "Well, if something goes wrong here, how do we cover ourselves?" And so then, they'll also reach out to us and say, "We need support for this kiosk application that's been running in our branches for 15 years, and it's end-of-life, but what happens if it breaks?" We get those sort of things.
Greg Wilkins:
Well, I'm probably talking a little bit out of turn here, because Jesse would do more of it than me, the CTO, but I don't feel that we do a lot of cold ... We don't do cold calling, or door knocking, or whatever. If we see someone doing an innovative or a particular use of Jetty, we might chat to them. Or someone asking a particular curly difficult question on the open source forum, I guess the trigger on the open source forum is, if they start saying, "This is really important to my customer" or, "This has to be done by yesterday." And you go, "Well, we can help you on an open source forum, but if you want your priorities to be our priorities...."
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Are there use cases and ways in which the product has been implemented that you didn't anticipate? Is there any usage scenario over the years that totally blew your mind?
Jesse McConnell:
Well, we were at, I forget if it was a Java One or and an Eclipse conference a long time ago, and somebody from JPL showed up and talked to us about how they had used Jetty on that first Mars Rover, right? Not the latest one, but the first one that was there. We have no real context on where it was used in the process, just that this guy from JPL came up and said, "Oh yeah, we used Jetty on this for this rover thing." That was pretty cool.
Greg Wilkins:
It runs in so many different things. If you use the Eclipse IDE, the help page is served from Jetty. There's many, many different applications that have Jetty in them. Set top boxes and various things.
Jesse McConnell:
There were years where whenever you'd go to a coffee shop or whatever, they had these devices that would redirect you to a login or whatever, and for years, a lot of those ran just a little embedded Jetty on their box.
Greg Wilkins:
I still remember seeing it the first time, because Google started using Jetty without us knowing.
Thabang Mashologu:
And how did they use it?
Jesse McConnell:
Google App Engine alone, based on their execution model, any given request can come in and spin up a new instance of the web app. And if it's Java and on Google App Engine, then you could spin up one new instance there and have another instance of Jetty running. It's embedded in so many different things. You can easily say that based upon your definition, that it's the mostly widely deployed Java application server out there.
Greg Wilkins:
And I guess, one of our biggest, probably highest volume deployments is inside Presto, which is what powers Facebook and that Presto is powered by Jetty, so it's using HTTP and space HTTP 2, to send a large amount of requests across to their cluster and get all the responses, and correlate them, and send them out again, to work down to the final answer. And there's no particular reason that http should've been used for that protocol, other than developer familiarity and understanding how it worked. So it's the amazing things that HTTP gets used for, which wasn't its original purpose of just serving a web page to a browser, which I think is quite amazing.
Jesse McConnell:
I guess another, we have another client that basically makes use of Jetty as their single point of entry into their massive network of services and stuff into their company. They did it there because Jetty was a very low footprint, they could scale it up however they needed to, but they were able to add whatever monitoring they wanted onto it, so now they have the ability to monitor all the incoming connections that are coming in from the outside, through the course of the year. I really can't tell you who it is, but they have got a lot of traffic coming in, and there's a lot of backend services that all get together or knit together into that dynamic front end that they have. And that's a very common scenario .
Greg Wilkins:
To flip this back to the business scenario, quite often a lot of people will come to me and say, "I need a servlet server. Why should I use Jetty rather than XYZ competitor?" And for the person who's asking for a commodity servlet server, if they're asking that question, the answer really is, it doesn't matter which one you use. Most of the standard implementations, or the implementations of the standards, are good. They'll serve your request, they'll adhere to the standard as best they can.
Greg Wilkins:
Where we live and thrive, is in those ones that want to be a little bit different. They have extraordinary amount of load, they're load profile is different. The way they're deploying it is a little bit different. And that's where our target business is. We don't want to be commodity, because we see that the expertise that we're selling is the developers of Jetty. We're the expensive resource that you pay money to get access to us, to help you solve your problem, which is probably vaguely related to HTTP and Jetty, and we can use Jetty to solve that problem. We're not in the business of being, I want to stamp out another web application that just adheres exactly to the standards and doesn't go beyond.
Thabang Mashologu:
Got it. Now, switching gears slightly. If memory serves, you brought the Jetty project to the Eclipse Foundation in 2009. Why did you do that?
Greg Wilkins:
I guess it's very much tied up with the history of open source. The original, when Jetty started 25 years ago, it was a hobby for me. It lived on my home server. I occasionally backed it up onto a tape, and that's where it lived. It had the legal protection of whatever license I'd slapped together at the time. And that was good enough for that environment back then. But then as open source congealed into a movement and a way of doing things, we first went to SourceForge, and I think we first went with the Apache one license there. I'm getting a bit foggy. And that's when we started building up the concept of, it's good to have an open source forge. It gives you a little bit of a legal, well, it gives you all the infrastructure so people can come and see the source code. They can interact with it. But SourceForge actually didn't give us very much of a legal infrastructure.
Greg Wilkins:
We moved to Codehaus, and that was more just to be with like projects, and it was a very similar offering to SourceForge. And again, it doesn't give us a legal umbrella, but it gave us the structure, and we lived with like projects, and we were able to talk to other people about how they were developing their open source things into businesses, and stuff like that.
Greg Wilkins:
Unfortunately, Codehaus as a business model for supporting the infrastructure, wasn't successful. Although, it went for a few years, but it wasn't able to sustain itself. So we had to look for a new home. And at that stage, I guess we were starting to be contacted by a lot of bigger companies that were using it. And the standard question that would come from a large three letter firm, "Oh, we've embedded your product into this project. We're selling it to the government of this foreign country. We have ITAR restrictions and export restrictions, and can you please give me an audit to show that you own all the IP? There is no patents, of IPO problems in the software." And the questions from our larger users that wanted to know that it was patent-free, and that it didn't have any protected cryptography for export, and that we were the owners of it, and therefore, we could enforce the license.
Greg Wilkins:
And these were things that we had done, but we didn't have the firm process and the ability to back it up. And so what Eclipse gave us, was to be able to formalize that process of making sure we were IP clean, that we were patent-free, that we knew all our contributors, and we did so in a form that we could represent to our users, so that when a large company was exporting to a third world government, they didn't have to come to and ask the question of us, to prove it that we were okay. That information was already there and available, and would give them the confidence to pick up and use it.
Greg Wilkins:
And I guess that was the primary reason of going to Eclipse. Again, they were providing the hosting side of things, the repositories and stuff like that. I have to say thank you very much Eclipse for those, but also thank you very much for when they let us go to GitHub. Their core competence is probably more on the legal framework, rather than the technical framework. I probably have trod on some toes there. But to us, it's we're very happy with the technical framework of the hosting at GitHub and the legal framework of Eclipse.
Thabang Mashologu:
And can you elaborate on what it means for a company of Webtide's size to be involved in the Jakarta EE working group?
Jesse McConnell:
It's interesting that we can participate on the calls like the platform call and things like that. And it's a different mix of people, but all seem to have the same goal in mind, of taking formerly Java EE, now Jakarta EE, into the future. There's some ra-ra-ra, re-re-re stuff, because they the big bang approach for the renaming and all that kind of stuff. And it's questionable how much intrinsic value the current release has over and above the previous one, except that it establishes the basis for being able to move forward, to continue innovating all these different specifications and stuff.
Thabang Mashologu:
And overall, what is it like working with the Jakarta EE specification process?
Jesse McConnell:
It is a pleasure working with the Jakarta EE process, thus far. It's immature in areas, but it's actually refining as it goes, which is pleasant to see.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, certainly. Now, what would you say to other companies and entrepreneurs that are considering participating in open source as a core element of their business strategy?
Greg Wilkins:
It's very subjective in terms of open source is a pathway. You can make money out of open source. You can have a very good career out of it. But it's not going to be for everybody. If you're an open source provider, then you're probably going to be a lot more about building the technology out, than you are about building the company out, the corporation out. Other companies have built, you know, the Red Hats of the world have built big services on top of open source software. And I can't speak to that model, because I have never been in that world. Well, momentarily, but ran away screaming.
Greg Wilkins:
And so it's if you wish to embrace the technology and get paid for your expertise, your embrace of innovation and stuff like that, it is a model that can work. It's easier nowadays than it was. But it's still a constant fight to keep that education process going, of what open software is, and make sure that the end users realize that if nobody pays for it, you know, if any user of our software has the capability to pay for support and advice, but chooses to not do so, because they don't have to, they just have to ask themselves, well, if that was a rational decision, and everybody made that same rational decision, then nobody would pay for it, it wouldn't exist.
Greg Wilkins:
So it's that education that you have to keep educating a new generation over, and over, and over again, that if you have the capability to pay and there's benefit to you, then you should. Because they don't have to pay, it's a bit of an effort all the time. At the moment, we're in a happy place. The big commercial users understand that they have to support the open source things. But it hasn't always been that way, and it may not always be that way. So it's really important for the Eclipse Foundations of the world, and the Apaches of the world to continue that education of what open source is and that it's not free. There's no dollars flowing into it. The dollars have to be there to support the developers.
Greg Wilkins:
As a career path, it's a great one, because it does allow you to participate in a wider community of other projects that are related, other technologies. I often whinge that I've been writing a HTTP server for 25 years. The same program over, and over, and over, and over again. And I still haven't got it right, how boring could that possibly be? But I guess it's been far from boring, because of all the different projects that you rub up against, and you can see, and that you actually integrate with, and it's not a commercial boundary to another company.
Greg Wilkins:
It's an open source boundary. You see the developers, you talk to the developers, you see their code, you integrate, you innovate, and you work with them for a while, and you come up with some great things. And then, that relationship either lives and blooms or runs itself, and then you go off and you're an expert in something else. I talked about how we did messaging for asynchronous stuff. We were message bus experts, and then a couple of years later, we're in large distributed databases Hadoop and Presto, and things like that. And so we're, what's it called? Cassiopeia or whatever or something. And also we're an expert in distributed databases. And so it means that your project gets involved with other projects. You do really interesting stuff. As a technologist, it's great. As a CTO, it's fabulous. As the CEO, it's probably a nightmare.
Jesse McConnell:
Oh, I don't know about nightmare, but it's not the easiest thing in the world. From a business perspective, yes, somebody is writing that software, and we are from the days when it's just a group of people who are writing code on the weekends and that's it. We are firmly in the professional open source realm, and professional open source, there's a couple of different ways that you can make that business viable. And our model is, I don't want to say is completely unique, but it's pretty unique, because you don't see a lot of companies out there who have the level of usage that we do from an open source perspective. That we're able to spend 100% of our time working with clients in open source, on the open source version.
Greg Wilkins:
They key distinction, it comes back, I think it's the Linus Torvalds quote of, there's a difference between free speech and free beer. Free means different things. And if our company was a company that was based on giving out free beer, we'd have gone broke a long, long time ago. So it's not that we're giving away free beer software. We're not giving away software for free. We are writing software that has freedoms attached to it. Freedoms to extend, freedom to use, freedoms to distribute, freedoms to enhance. Aspects of our software have freedom built into them.
Greg Wilkins:
But the commodity we're selling, is not the software. The commodity we're selling is our advice. We're the expensive resource. The software, you're free to use is, you're free to copy it, you're free to distribute it, under the terms of the license. But if you want our advice on how to do that well, if you want our advice on how to avoid pitfalls, if you want us to change it, you want to make our priorities your priorities, sorry, if you want to make your priorities to be our priorities, and how to handle it, then there's a commercial arrangement there.
Thabang Mashologu:
Got you. Now, Jetty is famously by developers for developers. What advice would you give to somebody starting out in their career, regarding getting involved in open source?
Jesse McConnell:
I'd talked to a number of college kids who were graduating from college. Either interviewing, or just trying to do some senior project to talk to someone in the industry, or whatever the case may be. And from an open source perspective, I don't know that from a coder, that there is any better example of a way to network, to get yourself out there. There are so many different open source projects. All of them are interested in your time. They're interested in your time from a documentation perspective. I don't know how many English majors are out there. An English major that actually wanted to get a little bit of experience on the side, and actually have a portfolio graduating from college, plug into an open source project and help them write documentation. Help it seem like it's actually English instead of techno babble.
Jesse McConnell:
These kinds of things in open source, it's not just necessarily the coder who sits in the dark dungeon and writes code or whatever. No, it's a lot of different disciplines, a lot of different things can impact it, and make a mark. But then, that also just sits on their résumé and moves forward. If I was sitting in a major corporation trying to look through a stack of résumés, and I see a graduate from here, a graduate from here, a graduate from here, a graduate from here, and oh look, they're a committer on this open source project.
Jesse McConnell:
Well, that already means that they know how to work, in theory, distributed. They know how to actually work with revision control and stuff like that. I mean, a lot of colleges, you can graduate from college without understanding what Git is. Or how a build chain works. Or how to collaborate at all. So if you're graduating from college, the best thing you can do is, be a committer on an open source project. And you don't even have to restrict yourself to working on something infrastructural like Jetty. It can be whatever, because there's a ton of different open source projects.
Jesse McConnell:
I mean, that would be my advice to somebody who's just entering into the industry, is open source doesn't necessarily have to be your career. If you're lucky, it could become your career. That may end up being a bit like one of those sport stars or something. It's unlikely you're going to be the rock star where you're singing, or playing a guitar, or whatever. But if you are involved in open source, and you're involved in a meaningful way, then maybe this company is going to pick you up and pay you to work on that open source software. And then if the project gets big enough, then you may be able to have an opportunity to take one of the two routes from an open source business perspective.
Jesse McConnell:
Our more calmer, I'd say maybe, approach to the lifestyle business, or you sell your soul to a VC and try and come up with some way that you can make a 10x return on their investment. Both are completely viable strategies for open source projects that actually want to go to the big time. But that doesn't have to be your goal right out of the gate.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, it makes sense. And what impact would you say your participation in open source communities has had on hiring the right talent?
Greg Wilkins:
As a small company, we have fluctuated above the 10 number sometimes to be at 15, and whatever. Hiring has always been a really difficult, but extremely important decision to make. Are we going to this hire person, put resources into them, and are they going to represent the company well? And it's invariably been that the hires that have worked well, have been people that we've worked with already, either they've already contributed to the project, or they were on a related project like Maven, or various other ones, so we knew of them already. We'd already interacted with them, they knew what we were doing. And those hires have been incredibly successful, and I think probably everybody we got on board on the technical side at the moment, came in that way.
Jesse McConnell:
We're unlikely to hire again from a non-open source. We want to see open source credentials.
Greg Wilkins:
Yeah, it's been so typical where we've just got the CVs, gone through, they look technically competent, but they've gotten little exposure to the open source way of doing things. And those have been our least successful hires. And I think that would be true, even if we weren't an open source company. What Jesse was saying is that the graduates that come out and don't know the software process, they know parts of it, but just the whole using configuration control, getting it all together, doing a release, then lather, rinse, repeating, doing it again, and doing it again. They might've got together and done a release of a bit of software engineering for one project at the end of their studies.
Greg Wilkins:
But if they're actually involved in open source, they really understand. They can see what's happening. They see the sort of issues. They see how you interact with clients and users. And it's an order of magnitude, a leap above what you get straight out of a university. Some of our best employees, our engineers, don't even have formal training. They just come at it through open source. They have different backgrounds, and for us, the fact they're able to work in open source, was more important than they didn't have a Computer Science degree.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, for sure. That is probably a great place to wrap up our show today. Before we go, where can our listeners connect with you online?
Jesse McConnell:
Well, you can always go to Webtide.com. I mean, that's a pretty easy way to get a hold of us. Or you can go to the Eclipse or Jetty website. Eclipse.org/Jetty. CometD.org, that's another one for messaging. Or GitHub, the Jetty there.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yep, that's great. It's been such a treat having you on the show Greg and Jesse from Webtide, the little company that could and did have a global impact. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Greg Wilkins:
Thank you, it's been fun.
Jesse McConnell:
We appreciate it, nice, thank you.
Thabang Mashologu:
That is about it for this episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source podcast. You can find us online at EntrepreneurialOpenSource.com and @OSS4Biz on Twitter. We'll catch you next time on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or any other place you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Thabang Mashologu:
The Entrepreneurial Open Source podcast is sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation provides a global community of software developers and organizations of all sizes across industries, with a business friendly environment to collaborate on open source software innovation. Visit Eclipse.org to learn more.