The New Kingmakers

Chapter 3. How Did We Get Here

The Disruptors

In the latter half of the 20th century, developers were effectively beholden to their employers. The tools they needed to be productive—hardware and software—just were not affordable on an individual basis. Developers wishing to build even something as trivial as a website were confronted by an unfortunate reality: most of the necessary building blocks were available only under commercial licenses. Operating systems, databases, web and application servers, and development tools all required money. To get anything done, developers needed someone to write checks for the tools they needed. That meant either raising the capital to buy the necessary pieces, or—more often—requesting that an employer or other third party purchase them on the developer’s behalf.

The new century, however, has ushered in profound and permanent shifts in the relationship between developer and employer. No longer is the former at the mercy of the latter’s budget. With the cost of development down by an order of magnitude or more, the throttle on developer creativity has been removed, setting the stage for a Cambrian explosion of projects.

Four major disruptions drove this shift: open source, the cloud, the Internet, and seed-stage financing.

The Symbiosis of Open Source and Developers

The phrase “open source” did not yet exist in 1995, when the first versions of the Apache web server and MySQL database were being written. It was coined in 1998, when the world needed ...