Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

From The Business of Open Source by Emily Omier

October 8, 2025 · 35 min · Episode 267

About this episode

Emily Omier interviews Tom Hacohen about the dynamics of open source business models and developer influence.

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tom Hacohen , CEO and founder at Svix. We kicked off the conversation by talking about why Svix is an open core company… but Tom still initially didn’t think he’d be a good guest for the podcast. Unlike a lot of open source companies, Svix doesn’t make open source a huge part of its identity. Yes, there are business reasons for being an open source company, but the open source nature of the company isn’t plastered all over every piece of marketing material. So why does it matter? Developers prefer open source, and they’ll always choose the open source option if there is one. On the other hand, developers don’t often have buying power (and don’t even know how to buy software even if they did). But developers can influence buying decisions, and that can be important. We also talked about how there are different constraints that the open source project and the cloud version operate under. For example, ease of deployment doesn’t matter in the cloud version, because it doesn’t impact user experience at all. But the opposite is the case for the open source project, and that leads to different technical decisions. We talked about…

People in this episode

Host: Emily Omier

Guest: Tom Hacohen

Topics covered

  • open source
  • business strategy
  • developer influence
  • cloud computing
  • technical decisions

Keywords

  • open core
  • Svix
  • developer preferences
  • cloud version
  • open source project

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Svix

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