2025-09-30 –, Gaston Berger
Challenges in economics and governance models for open-source scientific projects
In this presentation, the CEOs of two companies at the forefront of open-source scientific software development - Sylvain Corlay of QuantStack and Yann Lechelle of Probabl - examine the intricate challenges of open-source funding and governance and reflect on how these two aspects interconnect.
We start by reflecting on the origins of the open-source movement within the scientific community, and delve into the contemporary challenges of operating businesses and identifying sustainable economic models that both leverage and contribute to open-source software.
In particular, we highlight the unique approaches and experiences of QuantStack and Probabl, which primarily contribute to multi-stakeholder scientific projects such as scikit-learn, Jupyter, Apache Arrow, or conda-forge.
Key Topics of Discussion include:
- How to navigate business constraints in relationship with open-source development release cycles, and decision making in the context of multistakeholder open-source projects.
- How to safeguard employees from negative interactions, when most of their professional interactions happen in the open.
- How to build economic models that align business interests with those of the open-source projects and user communities.
We look forward to your questions and insights to further enrich this discussion.
Sylvain Corlay is the founder and CEO of QuantStack. He holds a PhD in applied mathematics from University Paris VI.
As an open-source developer, Sylvain Corlay is active in the Jupyter ecosystem. He is the co-creator of the Voilà dashboarding system and the Xeus C++ implementation of the Jupyter kernel protocol. He maintains several other projects of the Jupyter stack.
He is also a core contributor to conda-forge, and of several other scientific computing open-source projects, such as bqplot, xtensor, and ipyleaflet.
Beyond QuantStack, Sylvain does a lot of volunteer work for the community, as a member of the board of directors of NumFOCUS from 2018 to 2024, as co-organizer of JupyterCon 2020 and 2023, and organizer of the PyData Paris Meetup.
