This is where the Sudo Show actually started. Episode one of a podcast that had been two years in the making, finally out on the Destination Linux Network with my co-host Brandon Johnson.
Brandon and I had been talking for years, late nights over Telegram, comparing notes on what the enterprise and open source worlds looked like from the inside. He was seven years into Red Hat, focused on virtualization, OpenStack, and Kubernetes. I had come up through Linux sysadmin work, made a move to GitLab, and was starting to figure out that my real skill was getting people excited about things rather than managing servers at 2am. We decided to start recording those conversations and call it a podcast. That is the whole origin story.
Episode one was a level set: what does enterprise open source actually mean, and why is calling it a contradiction a mistake? We walked through the spectrum from proprietary to open core to fully open development models, using GitLab, Red Hat, SUSE, and Cloudera as examples. Brandon made the distinction between products and projects that I still think is one of the clearest framings I have heard on the topic. A project has no lifecycle or support. A product wraps those things around it. Both have their place, and knowing which one you are depending on matters.
We also got into the newer funding models emerging at the time, GitHub Sponsors, Tidelift, and the growing trend of companies like Netflix and Google open sourcing internal tools that became foundational infrastructure for the rest of the industry.
Listen to Sudo Show Episode 1: What Is Enterprise Open Source?
The Sudo Show was one of the most rewarding things I have built, and this episode laid the foundation for everything that followed.