In our efforts to uncover the keys to open source success, we may be overlooking the most important attribute of all: Profound naïveté. Talk to Dries Buytaert (Drupal) or Daniel Stenberg (cURL) or [insert name of your preferred project founder] and in nearly every case they started their respective projects to “scratch an itch” with no real sense of how difficult the work would be.
The same holds true for Matt Klein, founder of the popular Envoy project. Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy that today boasts significant contributions from Google, Apple, Salesforce, and others, but it started as one engineer’s quest to help his employer (Lyft) move from a monolithic architecture to a microservices-based infrastructure. The decision to open source Envoy, Klein said in an interview, was only possible because “we were all very, very naive.