About this episode

Stephen Goldberg discusses the transition of Harper from a closed-source to an open-source company and its impact on sales cycles.

This week on The Business of Open Source, I chatted with Stephen Goldberg , co-founder of Harper , about the process of taking Harper from a closed-source software company to a open source company. I already talked to Ethan Arrowood about the transition to open source, but Stephen was able to give a founders perspective about why Harper wanted to move to open source, why it wasn’t launched as an open source company from the very beginning and why they choose the moment in question to go open source. He says that 80 to 90% of the effort around taking a big piece of Harper open source was around communication, both external and internal. It’s not that difficult to change an license or to push something onto GitHub, but a successful open source launch is about so much more than that. Here’s what we talked about: The board pushed back a lot, mostly because they felt like going open source was going to complicate things for the company and they were worried that the risks outweighed the benefits Stephen was convinced that even as a closed-source company, their customers weren’t paying for their code, but rather for their services. Harper also sells to large enterprises, and he was…

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