How I took my open source business to a Fortune 500 company
Presented by:
Michael Meskes
Michael Meskes holds a Ph.D. in database science and has worked in the open-source industry his whole career. After his time at RWTH Aachen university he started and ran credativ, a pure open-source company that is now part of NetApp, where Michael is still leading the same group of open-source enthusiasts. On top of that he is tasked with improving open-source work within NetApp.
Coming from the Unix landscape he started working on free and open-source software in 1993 and subsequently joined several free software projects like the Linux kernel (1994), Debian GNU/Linux (1995) and PostgreSQL (1996). He is still active as a Debian developer and a PostgreSQL committer as much as his real life commitments allow him to.
Michael has engaged in significant open-source evangelism and given related presentations at numerous events. He teaches open-source infrastructure and cloud components at a local university as an adjunct professor.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
There is a lot of information available about how an open source business should be set up and run. The exit, however, is a completely different story. There are different exit scenarios, the most challenging probably is selling a medium sized compay to a big enterprise. During my 25 years in open source business I experienced quite a lot of exits and participated in several on the executive level. This presentation walks the audience through the process and shares some do's and don'ts for executive management to accomplish a successful merger with the focus being on details that are special to open source or similarly structured businesses.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 20 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Professional Development
- Difficulty:
- Easy