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!
You’ve started your open source business or you plan to? And you don’t know what to look for for a good exit? In particular selling to a very large company is challenging. There are a lot of differences and traps you may never expect that can significantly change the outcome. Based on the experience of several deals on the executive level this presentation walks you through the process and shares do's and don'ts. It will help you accomplishing a successful merger with a much larger entity. The focus is on details that are special to open source or similarly structured businesses.
- Date:
- 2025 March 19 15:00 EDT
- Duration:
- 20 min
- Room:
- Seminole D
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Professional Development
- Difficulty:
- Easy