Lori Lorusso is head of community, Percona.
I have recently be en to two of Europe’s most popular open source community events: FOSDEM in Belgium and State of Open Con in the UK. So, what are my biggest takeaways?
On the community side, there is no shortage of passionate people. Everyone who makes it to these events has an interest in technology, helping their projects grow, and collaborating with more people to solve problems. The depth of feeling is always amazing and inspiring.
On the other side, companies involved in open source have to build and sustain their operations, and that means creating profitable business models. A big challenge to this is telemetry. While we are keen to share our projects for reuse, we don’t have enough data on where they are used or where we might want to concentrate in future.
This is changing. Analytics company Scarf tracked more than 10 billion open source downloads in 2024. At Percona, we use telemetry data to understand how users interact with our open source products, helping us better serve the community. We hope other open source projects adopt this approach.