Tesora emerged as an open source company in 2014 from ParElastic, which offered proprietary software for scaling out MySQL installations. The company offered highly-specialized services that were extremely challenging to expand because they often ran into clients who refused to use anything that wasn’t open source. They discovered OpenStack Trove in 2013 and quickly got involved in the upstream community before relaunching themselves as an open source company.
Over the next year, the company had to learn how to participate in an open source community where they can’t make all the decisions, and must work across multiple timezones and communicate with the community on a regular basis. The company has come a long way towards understanding how to balance the needs and desires of the community with the company’s objectives, and they’ve witnessed major improvements to their services as a result.
