On the fourth episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Thabang and I welcomed Miro Spönemann, general manager and software architect at TypeFox. Based in Kiel, Germany, TypeFox helps businesses and engineers become more productive and innovate faster through custom developer tools and languages. Open source frameworks are essential to building TypeFox’s solutions, and the solutions themselves vary widely in scope.
“Customers approach us asking for support on platforms like Eclipse Theia and Eclipse Sprotty and also asking us to build solutions for them. So, the range of services is very wide, starting from a few hours of support up to several hundreds of days of engineering work for large projects,” Miro said.
Miro's history with open source software begins with Eclipse Xtext, a domain-specific language framework. Xtext was the first major framework they used to build solutions on, and one of the first Eclipse Foundation projects Miro contributed to. Miro has drawn from his experiences working on open source projects early in his career, specifically the lessons he learned about moving in the direction of real innovation.
Miro says one way TypeFox has focused on innovation that has business value for the company was their investment into open source libraries and tools that are built on web technologies. “That was one main reason to start Eclipse Theia and Eclipse Sprotty,” Miro explains.
Focusing on web-based development tools gives TypeFox more options for offering services, allowing them to create tools that are built into a web page or web application, while also being able to run them locally.
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