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Sunnyvale, CA
Ray is a Community Manager at PingCAP where he is helping to grow the TiDB community. Prior to PingCAP, Ray managed open source communities at Cube Dev, GitLab and the Linux Foundation. He has over 15 years of experience in the high-tech industry in roles ranging from software engineer, product manager, program manager, and team lead at companies such as EDS, Intel, and Medallia. Ray lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and daughter and all three are loyal season ticket holders of the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team. Previously Ray spoke at CHAOSScon, Community Leadership Summit, FOSDEM, GitLab Commit, and Open Source Summit.
Authored Comments
Sorry, I forgot to shorten the URL for the GitLab merge requests above. This should be easier to copy/paste: https://bit.ly/3EAY4Gr
Nice article Scott. I feel that sometimes there are more debates about what is open core than there are debates about what is open source. I'm not sure if it's the relative newness of open core, because a lot of purists dislike the open core model, or something else.
If you look at my bio, you'll see that I worked at GitLab previously. Their enterprise/paid edition is definitely not a no-go zone for contributions. The source code is available, and people have made contributions to the enterprise edition as you can see at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=merged&label_name[]=Community%20contribution&label_name[]=Enterprise%20Edition.
Since the enterprise edition is under a non-open source license, I understand this can dissuade some people from contributing, but no one is "barred" from contributing.
In addition to bolt-ons or glue code, I think there's another model that we're starting to see a lot of. Some companies (incl. my current employer https://cube.dev/) have open source software, but offer infrastructure/cloud services for users who do not want to manage the infrastructure. People are free to run the open source version of the software locally, but can also pay the vendor (depending on the tier) to manage the software in the cloud.