Michael Kennedy

Yeah, absolutely. So, on the podcast, almost every week I talk to somebody that is doing something cool with open source. It may be half the time, they're consuming open source, so I might talk to somebody at Netflix about how they're using existing open source libraries, to manage the cloud-computing infrastructure that they have. But other times, it's about people who are doing amazing stuff.

So it's really cool to see both sides and another component that I'd like to throw in there, I think that fascinates me the most, because it really bodes well for open source, is talking to the people who have companies, that are built upon open source projects. And just the amazing stuff that they're doing.

So an example that really surprised me, was this open source library called Scrapy. So Scrapy is a screen-scraping library for Python, and you can go in and say, suppose you want to go to some kind of website, they don't have an API but the data is clearly accessible with a CSS selector, as most data is. You can go in and basically turn that webpage into an API with the Scrapy library. I thought, Okay, that's cool, and I talked to probably the guy who created it, and he said, Now what we're doing is, we create a business around this open source library. Now if I had to ask you, how would you create a business around an open source library that does web-scraping? It's great that it's popular, maybe consulting, maybe training, but it's not really too much of that. What they're doing is they created web-scraping as a service. So they have all this infrastructure and the re-tryability, and the bandwidth, and the parallelism, to massively scrape the web with their API that you already know, and they sell basically, like AWS sells infrastructure and so on, they sell the ability to do web-scraping.

And I think those combinations of open source projects are the most amazing, because you know that open source project is going to be really vibrant, and really well-maintained, because there's a whole business around it. They have 130 people work in their company, that does that.