Today, I’m excited to announce that StackShare has joined forces with FOSSA, the only developer-native Open Source Management Platform! We believe the combination of two developer-facing companies is a significant moment for the larger developer community and we’re thrilled to share this news today.
As part of this acquisition, FOSSA will continue to operate and invest in the StackShare community and the free public site, while sunsetting the StackShare Enterprise offering. This means that for the vast majority of StackShare users, you’ll continue to have a place to compare and discuss tech stacks in an even better way.
First, let’s talk about FOSSA and why this acquisition makes sense.
Why FOSSA?
started out as a simple way for developers to get a better handle on open source licenses for all your dependencies. FOSSA launched a community resource called which has been a popular destination for developers trying to understand OSS licenses. FOSSA also developed one of the most popular dependency analysis CLIs with over 1.75M downloads. From there, they launched security vulnerability management to become a full-on Software Composition Analysis (SCA) offering. With the recent addition of SBOM Management, FOSSA has become a much larger security-focused platform, still with a developer-focused lens. FOSSA now has thousands of customers, including some of the world’s largest Fortune 500 companies, and has raised $38M in total funding to date.
With this context, there are three primary reasons why we believe StackShare + FOSSA make sense:
Developers still need easier ways to assess and share their experiences with tools
Developer tooling is a constantly changing landscape -- and over the years, many segments (especially security-oriented developer tools) have become incredibly confusing to navigate. For free and OSS tools, there are constantly new paradigms, trends and patterns to keep up with. For commercial tools, buyers are struggling more than ever to differentiate truth from marketing noise between vendors. Increasingly, the way people choose their technology stack is through practical discussions between trusted peers and practitioners: developers talking to developers.
StackShare is one of the few places left where authentic discussions around developer and security tools happen. Over the last 10 years, we’ve built an amazing community with research, discussions, and decisions surrounding developer tooling. By the numbers, StackShare has amassed more than 1.5M registered users, who have shared over 1M Stack Profiles, and the site has been used by more than 40M developers in total. FOSSA believes continuing to invest in this community is critical -- for healthy discussions between developers, practitioners, and customers.
Security teams want integrated developer tools management
Developers are a very unique population in the enterprise. For teams other than engineering, tooling adoption is tightly controlled for security, cost, and process consolidation. However for developers, it’s often the opposite. Developers adopt tools (and open source packages) democratically, often in naturally fragmented ways.
For most companies this is smart; it’s a business critical policy that allows them to innovate. But it also creates a unique gap for any centralized team accountable for this surface area -- especially security, compliance, and architecture. Just like open source packages, developer tools inevitably fall beneath the radar of enterprise controls. And unfortunately, both regulators and attackers aren’t slowing down the pressure on these areas.
Developer toolchains have become a natural part of the software supply chain to exploit, and we already have some clear examples. During Codecov’s breach in April of 2021, FOSSA customers ran fire-drills of immense scale, and also turned to StackShare to see if we could provide this kind of data about where the tools were used. Providing that visibility has emerged as a critical area for both FOSSA and StackShare.
Two industry leading companies joining forces to invest in data transparency
As an industry, we are still very early in establishing standards of transparency within our software supply chains. SBOM formats are constantly undergoing revisions by the regulators and the community, including entirely new types of data beyond open source packages – AI training data, infrastructure, and more. Ahead of standards, developer tools have already popped up as a growing surface area in SBOMs, and both StackShare and FOSSA have seen third parties begin demanding this data. At StackShare, we proposed an early solution last year with Tech Stack Files, which have already been adopted by thousands of teams and developers.
Beyond tools inventory data, teams everywhere are looking to answer hosts of questions about their supply chain that require comprehensive metadata -- for cost and technology consolidation, obsolescence management, architecture planning, and more. Most of this data simply doesn’t exist yet. We believe more of this data should be collected and curated openly. With FOSSA’s decade of open source analysis and research at scale combined with StackShare’s community, we see an opportunity to contribute the largest public knowledgebase and community of software supply chain metadata across a variety of dimensions.
The StackShare Community
StackShare launched in 2014 on Hacker News as a community site for developers (full timeline of our history here). The concept was simple: figure out what technologies you should use based on what other developers are using. Fast-forward 10 years, and over 40M developers have used StackShare to help them compare and research technologies based on their peers’ decisions.
Our mission has always been to “make developers more productive by learning about technology through the people and companies they trust.” To fulfill this mission, we started with an advertising business model that allowed big developer-focused brands like Atlassian, HashiCorp, Datadog, Snowflake, and many others to get in front of the StackShare community with clearly-labeled sponsored content and ads throughout the site. This worked well for the first few years then in 2019 we realized that we needed a business model that was more closely aligned with the value developers were getting from StackShare to be able to scale the business.
StackShare Enterprise was adopted by well over 2,000 engineering teams and our customers included Fortune 500 companies as well as public companies like Tyler Technologies. The key insight we gained while building StackShare Enterprise is that tech stack data and more broadly developer tooling data, is extremely valuable for enterprises with thousands of codebases. More importantly we saw that this was a gap in the market and that no other vendor provided this data.
That said, one of the key learnings we had while building StackShare Enterprise was that building and selling an enterprise SaaS offering is an entirely different undertaking. Our DNA was in building an open community of developers and creating a social experience for you to make tooling decisions. FOSSA’s DNA has always been in enterprise, which is why the combination of both of our strengths makes us a perfect combination.
So while we are sunsetting StackShare Enterprise, FOSSA plans on introducing a product next year that will be similar in spirit to StackShare Enterprise, focused on managing developer tools data within their platform. We learned a lot about what Tech Stack Intelligence and tools data needs to look like for enterprises to get real value. So as part of this acquisition, I’m excited to be joining FOSSA to help bring a new offering to market that incorporates these learnings.
Our focus moving forward for the community will be to make improvements to the site to make it an even better place to discuss tech stack decisions, get data on what’s being used by others, and help developers navigate tools in a better way. We’ve got tons of ideas based on your feedback over the years but we’d love to hear from you- please email us your suggestions and feature requests at stackshare@fossa.com.
Thank You
On a more personal note, I’d like to extend a huge thank you and tons of gratitude to everyone who contributed to StackShare, starting with the community. From Day 1, the idea for StackShare has been appealing to developers and your interest in being able to choose tools in a better way has been the driving force behind everything we’ve done. Without the love from developers and critical feedback, we never would have been able to get off the ground let alone build a company.
I’d also like to thank everyone who helped build the actual StackShare product - all our employees over the years, from our engineers, to designers, marketers, and advisors. You all helped build a product that millions of developers loved and used.
To our investors, thank you for supporting our mission and our vision and ultimately for making a bet on us.
And finally, thank you to Kevin Wang, Founder & CEO of FOSSA, as well as the rest of the FOSSA leadership for making this all happen and for welcoming me onto the team.
While this is the end of the independent StackShare journey, another one is beginning with FOSSA and I couldn’t be more excited to get to work on it!
