Open Source
Turning open source AI projects into businesses: open source business models, licensing in the age of AI, open core, and taking open source software to production on AWS.
All 8 Agentic SaaS Talks episodes about Open Source.
Open Source episodes
Episode 35: The Founder's Guide to Scaling Open Source AI Products to Production on AWS
Omnistrate co-founders Kamal Gupta and Alok Nikhil map the road from open source adoption to revenue: the four ingredients of monetization (project, enterprise features, distribution, go-to-market) and the three business models open to open source AI companies, product-led growth, AWS Marketplace co-sell, and enterprise sales. Alok closes with a live demo that turns vLLM into a managed inference service with a self-service customer portal, showing why distribution needs a control plane and why a Marketplace listing alone gets you discovered but not paid.
Episode 33: Open Source Licensing and Survival in the Age of AI, with Joshua Drake
Joshua Drake, President and CTO of Command Prompt with nearly 30 years in the PostgreSQL community, lays out the risks AI creates for open source: extraction without attribution, model collapse, AI-generated security holes, and legal exposure from derivative work. He argues that proof of human contribution, signed origins, and governance with humans in the loop matter more than ever, and shows how commercial open source companies can adopt AI without losing community trust.
![Building the Business Behind Open Source AI @ AWS San Francisco [Live]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wVRZe8xhymQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Episode 30: Building the Business Behind Open Source AI @ AWS San Francisco [Live]
A live panel recorded at AWS San Francisco bringing together open-source AI founders and builders from Zep AI, DataRobot, Command Prompt, Scalar Labs, StreamNative, and Omnistrate. The group moves past technical specs to share strategic and personal reflections on how open source AI teams deploy, scale, and monetize.
Episode 28: Commercializing Open Source: Why Most Founders Get It Wrong
Recorded at the AWS re:Invent SaaS Summit, four open-source veterans from Percona, Couchbase, and Omnistrate break down what actually works when commercializing open source, and the expensive mistakes founders make. The panel covers open core vs. foundation models, avoiding MongoDB-style license backlash, and partnering with hyperscalers without getting 'Amazon'd'.
Episode 25: Cloud-Native Databases on Kubernetes for AI Agents, with Sergey Pronin
Sergey Pronin, founder of Solanica and former Percona engineer, joins the panel to discuss why the SaaS-only data model is fracturing. The conversation covers 'Dark Matter Data' trapped inside enterprises, treating databases like cattle on Kubernetes, API-driven self-service provisioning, and why donating Open Everest to the CNCF matters for license-stable infrastructure.
Episode 20: The Agentic SaaS Executive Summit - Live Event
A live summit at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, hosted by Bill Tarr, with two panels. The first asks whether agentic AI is revolution, evolution or hype, with Shriram Sridharan of Rox, Guy Korland of FalkorDB, Mihir Pandya of Scale AI and Alok Nikhil of Omnistrate. It covers seat, usage and outcome-based pricing, the return of bring-your-own-cloud deployments, and enterprise demands for data lineage. The second covers commercializing open source with Peter Farkas and Peter Zaitsev of Percona, Gopi Duddi and Talina Shrotiya of Couchbase, and Kamal Gupta, including open core, license changes that cost communities trust, and foundation-owned projects such as Linux and Kubernetes. Founders deciding how to price agentic software or monetize open source can compare specific positions.
Episode 21: From Open-Source to SaaS with Head of Engineering at Onehouse
Varun Madan, Head of Engineering at Onehouse, walks through the journey of transforming the open-source Apache Hudi project into a high-performance, enterprise-ready SaaS platform. Covers data lakehouse architecture, building SaaS offerings, and includes a live demo of real-time data ingestion.
Episode 22: Taming AI Complexity with Head of Engineering at Anyscale
Jaikumar Ganesha (JK), Head of Engineering at Anyscale, breaks down modern AI infrastructure challenges and how Ray (the open-source compute framework) is powering production-grade AI at scale. Covers the 'AI complexity wall,' distributed training, and includes a live demo of building a multimodal AI app.