Open Foundations with Or Weis

About this episode

Emily Omier interviews Or Weis about the relationship between Permit.io and open source, discussing the concept of 'open foundations' and the balance between open source projects and commercial offerings.

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke to Or Weis , the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io. Or is a serial entrepreneur who has had a long career in developer tools. We talked about Permit’s relationship with open source, including of course the open source projects that they create and maintain. One thing to note is that none of Permit’s open source projects are branded as “Permit.” They are all separate from the permit.io brand. On the other hand, Or talked about the essential balancing act for open source companies… figuring out the balance between what goes in the open source project and what goes in the commercial offering. “Companies that get it wrong die, and companies that get it right end up flourishing,” he said. Or Weiss has a theory about open source businesses that he calls ‘ open foundations .’ He thinks that this model is better than open core — to be honest I think open foundations is a type of open core, but I think that Or’s argument about how to do open core are fundamentally correct. Permit’s primary open source project is OPAL, and the way that Or puts it is that Permit uses OPAL, but it is not OPAL. The two pieces of software are different and have…

People in this episode

Host: Emily Omier

Guest: Or Weis

Topics covered

• open source
• entrepreneurship
• developer tools
• business models
• commercial offerings

Keywords

• open source
• Permit.io
• Or Weis
• OPAL
• business models
• developer tools
• entrepreneurship

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Permit.io

Products: OPAL

More episodes of The Business of Open Source

• Why the World Needs the Agentic AI Foundation with Manik Surtani · June 8, 2026 · 34 min
• The AI-Induced Death of A Bug Bounty Program with Glauber Costa · June 1, 2026 · 44 min
• Changing Your Price Anchor with Anais Concepcion · February 11, 2026 · 33 min
• Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen · October 8, 2025 · 35 min
• Go-To-Market for Open Source Companies with Quentin Sinig · September 24, 2025 · 35 min
• Straddling open source software and the hardware industry with Rob Taylor · September 10, 2025 · 34 min