Portland Software Developers Ratchet Up Their Open Source Ambitions

Luke Kanies is turning pro.

The Reed College alum was 29 when he created an open source software tool called Puppet for managing data centers and other big computer networks. His project took off, winning adoption from a community of like-minded enthusiasts who deployed it at Twitter, Google, the New York Stock Exchange and many other organizations.

And so Kanies, now a 35-year-old CEO, is pushing Puppet up a notch, pitching a newly crafted, commercial version of the tool geared to make it more broadly accessible. His small shop, which moved to Portland from Tennessee with just three staffers in 2009, has 33 today.

With big-name Silicon Valley investors backing him, and shiny new digs on the top floor of a renovated Pearl District office, Kanies decided to see whether Puppet can build more than a community of technologists. He wanted to see whether it can build a big business that transcends the open source project he created.

In many ways, Kanies embodies Portland's overarching ambition to nurture a software industry and open source technology. "Open source" refers to a class of software developed collaboratively and shared freely across geographic and corporate boundaries.

The city's ragtag software developers are starting to coalesce into companies, graduating from an infatuation with technology and adopting some old-fashioned ambition.

Open source plays naturally to Portland's cultural strengths, cooperation and communication. But Portland has never had much success in software, and it has lost several of its most promising companies to the deep pools of financing and executive talent in the Silicon Valley.