La maison Iena was a very big office. In October 2018 we hosted OpenIO for a full day conference.The OpenIO festival. They came from Lille and invited customers and users. There were talks and demos.

I remember sitting in a few of these talks. By October 2018, we had already significantly dived into the code. We had upstreamed a few patches and reported some bugs. We were mostly autonomous on our side by then. Needing only a few inputs from the OpenIO team.

I really liked some of the talks but for most, we already knew what they talked about. My attitude at the time was that I didn’t want to “lose” time. So, at some point, I eventually went to chill in the cafeteria instead of mingling and listening to the talks. Now I see this was a mistake. The purpose of the OpenIO festival was not only to see talks and learn new things. It was also an opportunity to meet people, connect and build networks.

Back then I could not see it. I learned why later. My way of working was to push forward until I found a solution. I was used to doing everything myself. I didn’t “need” other people to help. That belief was starting to crack but I wasn’t far enough in my path to understand it. I would need to jump a few more energy orbits to fully understand it.

There are essentially two ways to have a company working on open source. Either sell support contracts or have managed services.

I’ve never felt the need for either. I didn’t know that my view wasn’t common. Personally, I would rather have OpenIO sell us professional services. To fix bugs, enhance reliability or performance. But that was me, us, in the team storage.

For multiple reasons, some from Scaleway’s posture, some from how our team worked, some from the nature of the support contract we had with OpenIO, tensions started to appear. The relationship with them started to degrade.

While that was happening we also had side quests.

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(a) Ayoub Boudhar, used to be a Scaleway intern and worked on Carbon14, R&D intern at OpenIO at the time, now Cloud Operations Engineer at Sage.

(b) Pape Badiane, an OpenIO intern at the time, now expert ELK/Kafka at GRDF

(c) Arnaud de Bermingham, CEO of Scaleway at the time, now CEO of OpCore​

(d) Loic Carr, intern at Scaleway at the time, now Senior Software Engineer at AWS

(e) Rémy Léone, Cloud developer advocate at the time, now Senior Software Engineering Manager, still at Scaleway

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(1) Photo from OpenIO flickr : https://www.flickr.com/photos/openio/albums/72157698324612562/with/29866222977/​

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Blueberry - Verzache
• Surveys by Natasha Stagg