On 2019-10-10 13:51:21 -0500 (-0500), Jimmy McArthur wrote:
We recently attended Ansiblefest in Atlanta and Zuul had a booth there. It was a great opportunity to meet with existing and potential Zuulies. Some common questions popped up over and over again, so I wanted to crowd source some answers that we could place on our FAQ:
[...]
Another one (or at least category) I got a lot while greeting folks at the booth:
Q. What's the catch? What's your business model? How do you expect to make money at this? Is this project venture-capital backed? Are you planning an IPO any time soon?
A. Zuul is a community-developed free/libre open-source software collaboration between contributors from a variety of organizations and backgrounds. These people have personal and professional interest in seeing Zuul succeed because they, their colleagues, and their employers want to be able to use it themselves to improve their own workflows. There is no one company backing the project, it's openly-governed by a diverse group of maintainers and anyone who's interested in helping improve Zuul is welcome to join the effort. Some companies do have business models which include running Zuul as a service or selling technical support for it, and so have an incentive to assist with writing and promoting the software, but they don't enjoy any particular position of privilege or exert special decision-making power within the project.
Of course, I think it's *possible* the reason we got asked these sorts of questions so many times is that Ansiblefest didn't have a booth sponsor category for community projects, so they lumped us into the "start-up company" sponsor category.