A Startup Case Study
of Open Source
Software
Leon Ho
Founder of Stepcase

Why Open Source
for Startup?
• Free as in free speech
• Lower cost

Infrastructure
• Development
• Lifehack Blog
• Stepcase Backend

Lifehack
iPhone
Apps
Plugins
SC Backend
GIT Wordpress Redmine
PHP Rails
Xcode
Memcached Lighttpd Apache MySQL
Monit
Mac OSX Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Development
deployment
Developer gitosis GIT
Developer Redmine
UI Designer Dropbox

gitosis
• Add an unix user for gitosis
• ‘sudo -H -u git gitosis-init < /tmp/
id_rsa.pub’
• Add extra public keys into keydir/
• Edit gitosis.conf
• Git commit and push

gitosis
[gitosis]
[group gitosis-admin]
writable = gitosis-admin
members = llch
[group devel]
writable = iphone/darkroom iphone/stalker iphone/enroute iphone/meetingtime iphone/
lifehack iphone/mtrar iphone/coterie
members = llch jkwan
[group intern]
writable = iphone/enroute iphone/meetingtime iphone/lifehack iphone/mtrar iphone/
darkroom
members = blei
[group designer]
writable = web/stepcase web/lifehack
members = llch
[group deploy]
readonly = web/stepcase web/lifehack
members = deploy

Redmine

SC Backend
Ruby on Rails
mod_rails
MySQL
Apache
Stepcase Lifehack S3
Web Blog
EC2 Server EC2 Server
Capistrano
GIT

Tips
• Keep it simple
• Automate whatever possible. Don’t overdo
• Extra bits requires extra admin effort