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.
Yann Lechelle is a tech entrepreneur and executive, co-founder and CEO of Probabl, an INRIA spin-off focused on scikit-learn, whose mission is to globally distribute open source solutions in data science and machine learning.
Previously, he was CEO of Scaleway, a public cloud provider with unique European values, and a challenger to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Over the past decades, he has founded and developed numerous tech companies, including Snips.ai, a leading company in voice processing and embedded AI, which he led from the seed stage to its acquisition in a commercial sale to Sonos, a pioneering smart speaker company listed on Nasdaq.
Yann is also co-founder of France Digitale, board member and VP ecosystem of HUB France AI, as well as board member of the One-o-One endowment fund and JEDI (Joint European Disruption Initiative). He contributes to the community as an angel investor, mentor, entrepreneur in residence at INSEAD, and Cloud and AI expert for the Collège Numérique France 2030 under the Secretary General for Investment under the authority of the Prime Minister.
Yann holds a Bachelor of Computer Science summa cum laude from the American University of Paris, as well as an MBA from INSEAD.
Alexander C. S. Hendorf is an AI strategist who helps organizations, particularly in legacy-heavy industries, turn data-driven strategies into sustainable change. His unique perspective is shaped by a 20-year journey that began not in a lab, but in the music industry, where as COO he led a start-up through its digital transformation. A Python Software Foundation Fellow and founder of the non-profit Pioneers Hub, he is dedicated to building the human-centric systems and inclusive communities needed to thrive in the era of autonomy.