Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Doss Rush, our enterprise technology editor,

and in this podcast, I moderate a panel discussion on some of the most heated topics in open source

with two of the leading founders of open source companies. Armand Dodger, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp,

which does open source tools for managing multi-cloud, and Ali Goetze, the CEO of Databricks,

a SaaS offering of Apache Spark.

Joining them in conversation is a 16Z general partner, Peter Levine, who's invested and been on the

board of numerous open source companies such as GitHub and Netlify. It's a great discussion,

and it takes on everything from making money on open source while managing community,

to the nuance of partnering and sometimes competing with big cloud vendors. Just to note that this was recorded at a live

event, so there are some audio issues. The first voice that you're going to hear in this is

Armands, then Ali, and a few minutes into the conversation Peter joins them. Finally, please note

that the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken

as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security.

And it is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details,

please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Throughout the history of open source, talking about making money on open source has been a

pretty controversial topic with a lot of different views.

So I'm curious, Aliyan, Aramond, how have you thought about commercializing open source,

and why did you choose to turn a project into a business?

For us, it didn't start necessarily as thinking about turning the open source into the business.

It was more around recognizing that there's a clear market gap in terms of in our case,

or DevOps tooling, how do we actually provision things in sort of cloud infrastructure,

and then realizing it's very hard to become a large sustainable project if you

...