10 Insights from YC's Open Source conference

Got invited to a private YC Open Source conferences last week

Here are my top 10 takeaways from it!

1 - The old age of open source (pre-2015) was crazy
2 - Apparently it was normal to donate your open source project to the Apache organization?
3 - There are big differences between Apache 2.0 and GPL-3 as a license.
4 - Cloud providers stealing your project is largely a myth (see Redis + Azure partnership). GPL-3 Makes it impossible for this to happen
5 - OSI approved licenses matter to the community. GPL-3 vs ELv2 is a great example of that (even though ELv2 is a great license)
6 - It's unclear how much starcount growth matters after a certain point. It's a great proxy for community interest
7 - Community is the main long-term moat for open source projects
8 - Monetization for open source projects isn't always straightforward, but things go crazy when you figure it out
9 - Open source traction (adoption) feels a lot like social media DAU numbers. Not revenue, but might be a good proxy for future revenue
10 - If your community loves you, and you keep it happy.. it's hard to lose as an open source company