[matlock]

Thanks, appreciate the shoutout!

There certainly are other open source tools like ansible, Chef, Puppet, Hashicorp, MongoDB (and many more) that have started out as an Open Source project and are still OSS champions.

We have many plans for monetisation and are working closely with small to enterprise scale companies on building products and services around the Framework that help you once your infrastructure has reached a large scale. More info to come in the future.

[bjacobel]

To expand on my last point, how are you balancing the needs of an open-source community (steady, stable feature development, good communication/outreach/support, dedication to supporting existing products) with the needs imposed on Serverless by the VC funding model (acquiring new users quickly, launching new products you can monetize, getting hockey stick growth)?

[matlock]

The Serverless Framework is at the core of all our monetisation strategies, so we need the Framework to be spread to as many developers and into as many teams as possible and allow for way more complex infrastructure to be built. So by necessity we'll be pushing really hard on moving the framework forward.

I don't think the needs of an open source community stay in stark contrast to VC funding model, because without the Framework getting a lot of traction our other products aren't as interesting. So we'll be working on getting that traction. And we can't do this just by ourselves. We wouldn't be here without the Contributor community (literally because they implement so many features) so without good communication, outreach, support, ... we won't be able to grow fast enough.

I can only tell you that it is our true intention to push the framework forward very hard and build monetisation around it as much as we can to build this into a long term sustainable company. The more help and feedback we get to build the right commercial products and get great revenue (so we can give our Investors as well as our Team a return as well) the happier everyone is, including the community.

[SEJeff]

hashicorp is a company started my Mitchel Hashimoto. There is no open source tool named hashicorp. Do you perhaps mean vagrant?

[matlock]

Sorry yup I conflated Open Source Tools and Open Source Companies into one. Vagrant, Terraform, Packer, Serv and all the other great stuff coming out of Hashicorp.