Greetings!

My name is Chad Whitacre, and this is my homepage.

Bio & Blog

 

IChad Whitacre got myhis start in Open Source in 2001. IHe participated in the Python web development boom of the 2000s that gave rise to Django and Flask (myhis own contribution was Aspen). Along the way, Ihe experienced first-hand the tension between volunteer Open Source work and paid closed source work, so Ihe spent the 2010s as founder of a crowdfunding startup called Gittip (later Gratipay). Now here in the 2020s myhis role is Head of Open Source at Sentry, an application monitoring company with deep roots in the Open Source community. I blogHe blogs at Open Path.

Open Path, a blog about Open Source, tech, and society, by Chad Whitacre

Recent Work

Sentry 2020— Sentry is an application monitoring company that started life in 2008 as a tiny open-source side project and is now worth billions. I run the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) as Head of Open Source.

I built and run an industry-leading dependency funding program (2023, 2022, 2021). I co-run fossfunders.com to motivate other companies to follow suit.



I built and run a customer engagement program that regained Sentry's open source street cred even while headcount grew 3x.



I also run programs in compliance and self-hosting.
Proofpoint 2019—2020 I was an Engineering Manager for two diverse and productive teams at an enterprise security company.
Idelic 2018 I was employee four and my role was Engineering Lead. I built an ETL pipeline and made a few key hires.
Gratipay 2012—2017 I founded a crowdfunding platform that moved more than $1 million from dozens of companies to hundreds of open source projects, and explored the limits of organizational transparency and openness. Gratipay is survived by a fork, Liberapay. Vive Liberapay!

Also during this stretch I cofounded SustainOSS, and was an Open Organization Ambassador for Red Hat.