As a YC alum and co-founder of Mattermost, I often get asked by early stage YC companies about what it’s like to build a commercial open source business. With the start-up’s permission, we’ve started recording some of the Q&A sessions, transcribing them and sharing the more popular questions on the Mattermost blog in short form articles.

Our community has been at the heart of what makes Mattermost great since the earliest days. The first community members were people who were trying out the earliest versions of the platform, filing bugs and wanting to make feature improvements. Our open source community has grown, contributing thousands of pull requests, from new features and plugins to translations and documentation.

We’re excited to share that Mattermost has launched Open Source Fridays as a way to help our Engineering team have a structured opportunity to support and get involved in more open source projects inside and outside of Mattermost.

Many enterprises use open source enterprise support from a vendor, such as Red Hat or Canonical, to boost uptime and peace of mind. Others choose to use open source without any additional vendor support, relying on one of the major benefits of open source – the robust community support that is freely available.

Histograms (specifically the persistence of detailed information about the distributions of sampled data) have become increasingly important in the monitoring and observability industry. They are powerful tools that afford robust analysis while maintaining excellent economic value. However, there are a few challenges that are awkwardly technical in nature, but almost all of these challenges come down to compatibility of representations.

Logz.io has always prided itself as a company pushing the use of open source tech. As we have moved to expand our reach with metrics and traces over the past year and a half, we have doubled down on our own contributions to the community. With (distributed) traces in particular, we have been able to forge ahead. Our relationship with the teams at Jaeger and OpenTelemetry have really blossomed (and we are kind of proud to have supported the latter in the run-up to the OpenTelemetry v1.0 release).