crowd.dev

Welcome to a new edition of Open Pioneers - your weekly update from the forefront of open source. Today, we talk about:

• crowd.dev got acquired by the Linux Foundation

• New open source projects, including:

  • Firecrawl: Turn entire websites into LLM-ready markdown

  • sdfx: The ultimate no-code platform to build and share AI apps with beautiful UI.

  • jemma: AI agents that convert your thoughts to code.

• Best of Supabase vs Cal.com

Since last week, we have welcomed 33 new Open Pioneers. 👋 If you like this week's post, it would make my day if you would share it with a friend or colleague.

crowd.dev acquired by the Linux Foundation

Today is not the usual edition of Open Pioneers. I’m excited to announce crowd.dev, the startup that I built over the last 3 years, was acquired by the Linux Foundation. 🎉

crowd.dev is a developer data platform to enable developer-centric companies to connect community, product, and customer data in one place. Over 1,500 developer-centric organizations used our product to get more context about developers, drive developer adoption, or simply improve their developer experience. Through that, we gained a deep understanding of how developer ecosystems work. Naturally, open source was a big part of this. On top of that, we built crowd.dev in the open ourselves, gaining 3k+ GitHub stars over the last few months.

I guess most of the readers of this newsletter know the Linux Foundation. For over two decades, they championed the adoption of open source technologies. The Linux Foundation hosts and enables over 900 of the world’s most critical software projects (including the Linux Kernel, Node.js, PyTorch, etc.) that power a significant share of the technology each and every one of us uses every day. Fun fact: If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world.

Our shared story began in January 2023 when Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation reached out and asked to take a look at our products. Because our product was open source and a tool to help the Linux Foundation serve its communities more effectively, we were naturally aligned. 

Over months, it became clear that our teams share the same vision: providing the infrastructure for building a healthy, vibrant, and secure open source ecosystem. Therefore, it was a logical next step to join forces and keep pursuing this vision together.

Personally, I will be joining the Linux Foundation as a VP of Developer Products. The good news is that I will keep writing this Open Pioneers newsletter - hopefully with even better insights into what’s happening at the forefront of open source.

Thank you for reading through this. ❤️

🔥 New open source projects started last week

📚 More open source content

• Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins Link

• The state of open source in Europe Link

• Open Source Security (OpenSSF) and OpenJS Foundations issue alert for social engineering takeovers of open source projects Link

• Valkey celebrates its first stable release as open-source Redis fork Link

🥊 Best of Supabase vs Cal.com

I guess most open source folks who are active on X noticed that there was some tension going on between Supabase and Cal.com in the last few days. The two commercial open source heavy weights scheduled Product Hunt launches for the same day and created hype for it with a rather entertaining beef. Haters would say it was all fake.

Here is my personal best of:

By the way: Supabase made it to Product of the Day in the end, but I guess both companies - and perhaps even Unlogged - benefited from all the buzz.

Until next week,

Jonathan (@jonathimer)