Guest: Elad Ben-Israel (LinkedIn)
Company: Monada (Twitter)
Show: TFiR: T3M

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Elad Ben-Israel, CEO & Co-Founder of Monada, shares his insights on what open source means in today’s market and talks about his company’s own early-stage open-source project.

Highlights of this video interview:

• Monada is trying to create this abstraction layer for the cloud the same way that high-level programming languages created abstraction layers for traditional computing.
• Traditional programming languages are all designed around the paradigm that the computer is a single machine. In the cloud today, we’re using these traditional programming languages and we have to stitch together disparate pieces in order to actually deliver a full application.
• Monada is creating a programming language that has a distributed programming model, with cloud services as first-class citizens across all types of cloud providers and cloud stacks.
• Winglang is an open source, programming language licensed under the MIT license. The alpha version was released in December, and it has seen some incredible traction from the community at its early age stage. You can’t build real things with it yet, but people are contributing substantial features to the language and the SDK documentation.
• Open source is an end-to-end methodology for building software. It’s about product-market fit and correct engineering. Its foundation is collaborative work. It’s about supporting and helping each other. The more you’re able to do it transparently and share and collaborate with users and with the people who will actually use the project, the more it will grow in the right direction.
• Ben-Israel’s philosophy is to release something to the open source as soon as the vision is set, because the vision is what drives the basis of your open-source community. If you are able to find people who connect with that vision, then they will be the best people to help you build the right product.
• The beauty of open source is leaning into this idea that software evolves in an organic way. The more you’re able to connect to your users and connect with people who are actually in the field and building real things with your project, or want to build real things with your project, then the organism will grow in the right direction.

When choosing an open-source project, check:

• how many contributors
• how much engagement is in the forums, Slack, and GitHub
• the culture behind it: are they respectful and helpful to each other?
• the community that is building around the project: is it healthy, welcoming, and professional?

Foundations foster the adoption of open source because:

• They have amazing playbooks on how to create open-source projects as well as community-governed projects. Those two are not necessarily the same thing.
• Projects like Kubernetes, Linux, AWS CDK, or Winglang have very large surface areas, so they have great platforms for contributors to participate in.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.