I’m currently building an open source project called EventCatalog and bootstrapping the project.
My vision and passion is to help companies bring discoverability to their event-driven architecture.
In May 2024 I decided to leave my job at AWS to peruse my passion for open source and developer tools. After advocating and building event-driven systems over the past 8 years I felt there was a problem around documentation and discoverability for event-driven architectures.
Fast-forward to the present day, I can’t quite believe how many companies have the same issues around governance with their event-driven architectures, and how many companies are leaning into EventCatalog to help them.
Over the past 6 months the project growth has been between 15-20% every month. The number of installs of the project and usage in production is increasing, which is fantastic to see.
I try and connect with many friends, users, and founders to get advice as I explore this world of bootstrapping an open source project. How can you take something open source (free) and make a living from it, is something I’m exploring (future posts!).
One common question that comes up with many; if your product is growing and gaining traction, why are you open source?, why not just release it as proprietary software? This is a great question….
Why create an open source product?
I have been contributing and building open source projects / developer tools for 15+ years. Open source is a fascinating thing. At it’s core (for me anyway) it breeds the culture of collaboration, openness, and community. These are very close to my personal core values. I enjoy working with people, sharing ideas and collaborating on something that is way bigger than me…. and open source enables this.
I don’t have all the problems and ideas, but others do, I can collect these and build a product that helps many, leaning into the experience of the community and building something that can work for everyone.
EventCatalog could be closed source and make some money sure… but I feel open source can provide you much more than just business/customer relationships. Open source let’s you build trust with your audience, create your own unique communities and work together on the bigger picture, something bigger than I can ever do.
I’ve also learnt that open source wins the trust of developers. Speaking at conferences to advocating for this little niche, is way more authentic than me pitching a product to developers and architects. Open source introduces a level of personal vulnerability that I share with my audience, I like to get to know users in my community, create connections and feed this energy back into the product.
Of course this brings challenges, how do you make money from open source software? This is the hardest question, but there are solutions out there to help with open core models, plugins, integrations etc. These are areas I’m currently exploring, and my goal in 2025 is to make this project sustainable, if this project can reach this goal, then it’s exploring how we can grow the project, get more full time members and turn this into a project I believe can add a huge amount of value to this community and companies building event-driven architecture. I will share more on this as I learn and explore models… so feel free to subscribe if you want to follow me on this journey.
Going back to the original question—why is EventCatalog open source? Wouldn’t it be easier to monetize if it were closed source? The short answer is yes, it could be. However, the benefits of community, transparency, and open collaboration far outweigh the potential for quick financial gains (in my opinion).
