First, I want to give a big thank-you to Bennie Grant, who has been our Interim CEO over the past few months. Stepping into the CEO role is never easy — and doing it on an interim basis can be even tougher. Bennie, we’re grateful for the way you’ve helped steer us through this transition and kept things moving forward when there was a great deal of uncertainty and flux in play.  I am grateful Bennie has agreed to return to his COO role, and appreciate all the leadership stability he provides us with.
Now, onto Peter Farkas — I’m genuinely excited that our Board has chosen Peter as Percona’s new CEO. There are many reasons for my excitement, and I’d love to share a few of them with you.

Technical
I’ve come to believe that if a company wants to be a real thought leader in its technology ecosystem, it needs a truly technical CEO — someone who’s passionate about tech, a real “geek at heart.” Peter fits that perfectly. You’ll see him giving deep technical talks at conferences, and on weekends he’s just as happy tinkering with home automation using Home Assistant or flashing custom firmware onto his wireless router.

Open Source
Open Source is at the very heart of Percona’s DNA, so it’s crucial for our CEO to both understand it and truly care about it — and Peter absolutely does. Many of you know him as the founder and former CEO of FerretDB, a company built to provide an open-source alternative to MongoDB.

Entrepreneur
Peter Farkas is also a true entrepreneur and founder — he started his first company when he was just 14. He’s lived through the ups and downs of bootstrapping more than once. Being a founder is a unique experience you simply can’t get working inside a big corporation.

Percona Values
As many of you know from Peter’s own introduction letter, he was with Percona from 2011 to 2015 as our very first Director of Support. Those were hugely formative years for us — the time when we cemented our uncompromising open-source stance, our deep customer focus, and our drive to find the best solutions for users, not just the most profitable ones. I believe this approach is not only the right thing to do but also gave Percona a significant edge and inspired our customers, community, and staff. Over the past decade, some of that edge may have softened, and I’m confident Peter will help sharpen it once again.

Experience
Peter also spent time in senior leadership at Cloudera while building out a large team there. Cloudera was a major open source “big data” company that was highly successful in its time. That experience gives me confidence that Peter won’t just bring back the best of Percona circa 2015, but will also help guide the much larger Percona of 2025 into its next stage of growth and success.

Working for such an International company while being based in Hungary, also gives Peter a global perspective which is critical for Percona with staff based in over 40 countries.

Heart
Peter combines this with  a genuinely kind heart — he cares deeply about the well-being of our teams, our customers, and the wider community. At the same time, he has a brave heart, he’s courageous when tough decisions need to be made. Those choices aren’t always easy, but Peter has the heart and bravery to make the right ones.

Youth
When we started Percona, I was in my mid-20s — and back then, everyone that age felt perfectly ready for any leadership role. Nearly 20 years later, I sometimes catch myself looking at people that age and, almost unconsciously, thinking of them as “kids.” But I’ve learned that real strength comes from both sides: the hard-earned perspective and judgment that experience brings, and the fresh ideas, curiosity, and fearless appetite for learning that younger leaders contribute. Peter Farkas — younger than me by almost a decade, and younger than many of our senior leaders — is a great reminder that when we trust and learn from the next generation, while sharing the wisdom we’ve gained, we become a stronger, more adaptable company.

Finally, I wanted to share what Tom Basil, our Interim Board Member and before his retirement senior leader at Percona for many years has to say about Peter Farkas:

“In Peter Farkas I find a love for Percona and its people, a zeal for customer service, an intimate knowledge of the open source market, a wealth of entrepreneurial wisdom, and an honest man.  I am grateful he has accepted this CEO challenge, I believe Percona will be better for him, and I ask everyone to lend him their support.”

I’m very much looking forward to the next stage of Percona under Peter Farkas’ leadership. Please join me in welcoming him aboard!

P.S. If you are wondering what’s up with all these wolfs and rabbits – it is about our last names. Farkas means wolf in Hungarian where Zaitsev can be loosely translated as “of Hare” from Russian.

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The post Here’s the Message I Sent Welcoming Percona’s New CEO Peter Farkas appeared first on Peter Zaitsev.

One key way Open Source Software is different from classic Commercial software is that not every user is going to be a customer. In fact, for most successful Open Source projects, the number of users and uses is orders of magnitude more than the number of customers and “paid” deployments.

You may argue Commercial Open Source is just a case of “Freemium” model, which a lot of SaaS solutions use, yet there is a difference, if you have a SaaS you have total control over changing what is included in “free forever” plan and what is not, whereas in open source there’s much more nuance.

For simplicity, let’s focus on Single Vendor Open Source, where a single commercial company has all IP (trademark, source code, etc.) related to a given Open Source Project. From that company’s point of view, there are N deployments of the project, showing its traction, and P% of those are paying customers. These paid customers can be running the “Enterprise” version, Support Subscribers, or running in your Cloud.

The number of paying deployments (D) equals N × P if P is a proportion, or N × (P/100) if P is a percentage. So to drive it up, you can either increase N or increase P%. To increase your Sales $$$, you also can increase the number of $ you get per deployment, though trying to grow your business only through price increases is usually a very slippery slope.

With basic math out of the way, let’s talk about a couple of mistakes I see over and over again, which can cause catastrophic outcomes for the project, and which are basically on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Implementing Open Source Crippleware strategy

First, if you just listen to members of the Sales team, they often hate what the Paid version needs to compete with the Free version. In their mind, if only they could avoid “losing to Free and Open Source,” they would easily hit their quota many times over. As such, they often would advocate for increasing differentiation, which often means crippling the free and Open Source version. This, of course, can increase the P% and, especially short term, can give a very positive boost to sales, as it often takes a while for your users to find a feasible alternative.

Over time, though, you often would see your user base stagnate and shrink, and with N going down, there is only so much and so long you can continue by increasing P% and raising prices.

Furthermore, it is very possible for members of your community to come together and exercise their “right to fork,” which is unique to open source and which does not exist for “Freemium” SaaS Software. We have seen it happen with Redis, Elastic, MySQL, Terraform, and OpenOffice, among others.

Not enough Differentiation

Having said that, not having enough differentiation is problematic, too. Even if the number of deployments is insanely high, if your P% is zero… you’re obviously not making any money. You need to make sure there is a reason for customers to pay, and most likely it should not be charity/donation-based, as those do not scale and are hard to secure on an ongoing basis (though I’ve seen small projects successfully funded through donations, I would not call it a sustainable business model).

How to avoid those mistakes?

As Garima Kapoor, co-founder of MinIO, put it: “Never let monetization interfere with adoption.” I think it is a great way to think about this problem—you want everyone to be able to use your Open Source project and find it awesome for the purpose, yet you want those with the ability to pay to be motivated to do so. It can be a hard balance to find, but it is essential for long-term success.

Want to talk about where balance can be for your project? Drop me a line.

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It’s no longer surprising when a corporate-owned open source project abruptly shifts to a more restrictive ‘source-available’ license, such as SSPL or BSL. However, foundation-backed open source software has traditionally offered greater stability in this regard. While commercial sponsors may change and funding levels can fluctuate, the underlying software license has generally remained the same.

That’s what makes the whole NATS situation so unusual—and honestly, a bit alarming. If Synadia manages to pull NATS out of the CNCF and switch its license, it could shake people’s trust in the idea that foundation-governed open source projects are safe from that kind of change.

Here is CNCF message,  response from Synadia’s Derek  Collison (original creator of NATS), and also HackerNews discussion  for those seeking more first-hand information on this topic  

I won’t go over the whole story again, but I do want to call out a few key points.

First off, I think the NATS community deserves to have a say—this isn’t a decision Derek and Synadia should be making on their own. If supporting open source NATS just isn’t sustainable for them anymore, they should fork the project, apply whatever license they want, and pour their resources into that new version. Maybe that new fork takes off and NATS fades out. Or maybe the community rallies, new sponsors step in, and NATS keeps thriving as an open source project. Either way, the choice should be in the hands of the community, not a single company.

Second, donating a project to the CNCF should be a one-way street. You can’t just take it back later—and honestly, that’s kind of the whole point. It’s about giving the community ownership and ensuring the project lives beyond the original sponsor’s control.

Third, if Synadia really wants a commercially licensed version of the NATS server, there’s nothing stopping them from doing that, without needing to “take back” or fork the whole thing. They could offer something like “Synadia Enterprise for NATS” and still benefit from the brand recognition they’ve built. What they wouldn’t get, of course, is exclusive control over the NATS name, which might be what they’re really after.

Finally, there’s a lesson here for the CNCF too. If it wants people to trust the projects it hosts, it needs to make sure situations like this don’t happen. That means locking down all the key assets—like trademarks and licensing rights—before fully accepting a project. If things are still legally messy, like with the NATS trademark, maybe those projects should be flagged with a different status to show they’re not yet fully aligned with CNCF’s IP and governance standards.

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I fly a fair amount – both for business and for pleasure, domestically (in the US) and internationally.  This document outlines some “best practices” which I found working well for me. I am a frugal value-seeking traveller – I do not pay for “Business Class” unless it is some very cheap last-minute paid upgrade, though I get upgraded because of my airline status sometimes.

• Stops are risky (of missed connections) and waste time, so fly direct or minimize the number of stops, even if it is slightly more expensive
• For pricing, I look at the cost of the ticket and the difference between the preferred airline and the cheapest ticket available now. For me, if it costs below $400 to fly domestically and  $1000 for an International ticket, I just buy my preferred Airline (Delta or other SkyTeam airlines) if it is more expensive than that I’m OK with roughly 30% premium for the most convenient ticket.
• Having chosen an airline (Delta in my case) is a good idea – as you earn airline status you get some perks, most important of which for me is quick access to the human in case something goes wrong with the travel. In the past, I’ve wasted so much time waiting on the phone or trying to chat with airlines to rebook my travel or deal with other issues…  and still do flying with airlines where I have no status.  But even besides that sticking to the same Airlines means you get to know its route network better and know how to navigate connection airports easily, saving time and energy
• Access to Clubs can make travel much more pleasant and also save on airport food, especially travelling internationally as clubs outside of the US tend to have better food options. I get access to a lot of SkyTeam clubs through Delta Status (though it can be confusing which exactly) and have a Priority Pass through my credit card.
• Travel Early.  I prefer to take the first flight even if it requires a very early start.  These flights tend to have fewer delays and cancellations… and if something goes wrong there is a whole day ahead of you to be rebooked.
• Avoid Redeye.  I do not sleep well on the plane and will be quite grumpy if I did not sleep the night before. It is pretty impossible going to Europe or Asia though and Jetlag will make me miserable for a while anyway.
• Arrive in the US at my local RDU Airport.  While this is not always possible, it is awesome – passport control in RDU is a breeze.
• Know your connecting airports – I like Atlanta (ATL) and hate layovers in JFK as a personal preference.  Know the connection time actually needed, especially if security check and passport control are required – I’ve seen airlines suggesting itineraries which would be so tight even a minor delay means you’re missing a connection.
• Look for connecting airports with multiple daily flights when possible, so if you’re late you’re likely rebooked on a later flight instead of needing to wait another day or add a stop.
• Check weather in connecting airports – if there is a high risk of a storm or hurricane you may be better off changing your flight through a different airport before official notice and a mad rush of people trying to make changes.  This is especially great if there are no change fees.
• Fly with carry-on only.  I am always on the lookout for a maximum-size suitcase and backpack which I can get away with.   Checked baggage can get lost, you waste time waiting for it and it also limits your flexibility to adjust your flight if you’re on the way.
• Have a plan if WiFi does not work. Unfortunately, the availability and reliability of this service have a lot to be desired
• Watch inbound flights – this works especially well in the US with services like FlightAware –  in so many cases I can see inbound flights being delayed and make alternative arrangements before flight delay is officially announced
• Choose seats in advance. Otherwise, you might be assigned quite a poor one.  Here are a few tips:

○  Choose seats closer to the front, this can save 10+min, which can be important especially if connection time is tight

○  Emergency Row seats and Front row seats can be awesome, some have just an insane amount of legroom, though a fixed seat divider might be a liability if you happen to have an empty row.

○   On long flights checking seat-map during check-in can help you to spot where empty seats are likely and move there

○  If travelling with a companion taking window and aisle seats increases the chance no one will be travelling in the row with you… and if you get someone on that seat you can usually offer them an aisle seat and sit together.

While many flights these days have virtually no penalty for booking one way, some flights between the US and Europe may cost more one way than return. This does not make sense but this is how it is. In such cases, I book a return and when to cancel the return portion of the ticket for flight credit

Hope you find some of those tips helpful!

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For years, my passion has been helping Open Source Founders reach their dreams. With my commitments as Percona, CEO, I could only manage to assist through brief, informal conversations. However, since stepping down from Percona CEO role last year,  I have more time to pursue this passion. 

As such, I’m launching Strategic Consulting for Open Source Founders as a way to build deeper relationships and help your business succeed. 

A little bit about me

While I’ve worked with companies of various sizes, I believe I provide the most value to early-stage companies that look for making bold decisions and moving fast; companies aiming to stand out and challenge the status quo, those ready to take on an unfair fight against their much larger competition.

If you’re the Founder of such a company, chances are I can contribute to helping you achieve your goals faster. 

I am a Technologist and Entrepreneur who built Percona from a 2-man shop to a company with a staff of over 350 worldwide, with revenue in the tens of millions of dollars and an outstanding list of happy customers, all without resorting to external funding. Capital-efficient growth is one of my core areas of expertise and passion. 

I also assisted in starting companies like Altinity and FerretDB and helped them raise funding they required. So if you are on the path of raising venture capital, I can be of help too.

I have been educated as an Engineer and started my career as an Engineer before transitioning to be Entrepreneur and Business leader. This dual background equips me to understand both technical and business perspectives, allowing me to assist with the challenges of both aspects of the situation. I also have a very good understanding of the challenges a Technical founder faces when tasked with leading a business.

What I can help you with

I can help you with various issues ranging from product positioning, sales, and marketing to operational challenges such as working with remote teams or organizing service and engineering teams.

When it comes to Open Source, in particular, I can help you with choosing the right Open Source (or not) license strategy to match your product business model, build community around your project as well as build relationships with other related communities in the Open Source Space. 

How Does it Work

Interested in working together? Send me a message and we’ll schedule a free 1-hour consultation.

If all you need is a bit of guidance, you will get it for free with no strings attached. It’s my way of giving back and building relationships with the community.  

If you believe a deeper conversation or ongoing relationship would be beneficial, we can tailor solutions to meet your needs. 

If you’re an early-stage startup with limited cash, equity-based or delayed compensation arrangements are possible.

P.S. No, I will not help fix your database. Please direct all database-related inquiries to Percona.

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