Levine: Cloud and SaaS enabled the commercial monetization of open source
Peter Levine · a16z Podcast | A New Lab Rises · Jan 2, 2019 · at 9:28
a16z General Partner Peter Levine discusses how cloud hosting and SaaS enabled companies like Databricks and GitHub to build profitable businesses on open-source software.
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“Well, the element, I believe, that has brought open source from fringe hobby project out of academia to mainstream is the fact that you can actually build commercial businesses On top of open source. Right. And a lot of that, which you guys at Databricks are doing, and many other companies, GitHub is another example, these hosted offerings that leverage open source has given a very clear path to sort of marry the innovation with open source with the ability to monetize, which is very important from a commercial standpoint, and that, you know, up until sort of the cloud and being able to, you know, and SaaS There wasn't a clear path to go do that.”
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