A couple of months we launched our Open Source Program Guides and as part of that launch, we mentioned we will be actively publishing open source program case studies. We started with Comcast, Facebook and Salesforce, this month we’re happy to add the Autodesk open source program: Autodesk Autodesk is undergoing a company-wide shift to open source and inner source. And that’s on top of the culture change that both development methods require.
Last month we launched our Open Source Program Guides and as part of that launch, we mentioned we will be actively publishing open source program case studies. We started with Comcast and Salesforce, this month we’re happy to add the Facebook open source program: Facebook Facebook’s open source team was “formally” created in 2009, but the company has built with open source from its inception. Facebook.com was originally built on top of the LAMP (Linux/ Apache/ MySQL/ PHP) stack.
Last March we held a TODO Group track at Open Source Leadership Summit focused entirely on sharing best practices for businesses managing and building out open source programs. More than a dozen open source program leads and other leaders from companies shared their tips and best practices at the event. Furthermore in the last year or so, we have seen companies like AWS build out an open source program via @AWSOpen and even companies like VMWare hired their first Chief Open Source Officer.
We recently held a TODO Tools Working Group hackathon at Microsoft. There were about a dozen people from half a dozen different organizations. We ended up with three groupings of hacking around: repository linting, GitHub portal and GitHub data/crawling. Below is a summary of the work that was done and some next steps. Repo Linter (https://github.com/todogroup/repolinter) Repo Linter is a a simple linter to check for open source quality: https://github.com/todogroup/repolinter. We initially evaluated using https://github.
Last month, the TODO Group led a track at the Open Source Leadership Summit (OSLS) which featured a variety of talks dedicated to open source program management: Listed below are some of slides from the TODO track at the OSLS: The True Cost of Open Source by Patrick Steele-Idem (eBay) M&A Deal Diligence and its Open Source Benefits by Nithya Ruff and Gil Yehuda How Walmart is Building a Successful Open Source Culture by Andrew Mitry and Megan Rossetti (Walmart) We’re from Capital One and we’re here to help: the experience of contributing to open source at a large corporation by Jonathan Bodner (Capital One) Make your Corporate CLA easy to use, please!
The TODO Group will be hosting a formal open source office track at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Tahoe next year. We hosted a track last year and encourage the wider community to submit your proposals. We are especially interested in proposals that examine the structure of existing open source programs, what has helped those programs succeed (or fail!), how company culture has shaped those programs, and any lessons learned along the way.
Gil Yehuda (@gyehuda) had an opportunity to keynote at LinuxCon Japan 2016 about the rise of open source program offices, the presentation is provided below: See the presentation If you’re interested in joining the TODO Group, please reach out over Twitter!
More than ever, traditional companies are embracing open source and find that it can get out of control if they don’t have a coordinated plan to manage it. And what do I mean by a traditional company? Companies that are pre-open source (or born before 1995). Also companies that are not in the hardware or software product space, but more in the services space – financial, telecom, healthcare etc. These companies often do not have open source development models or knowledge in their DNA.
I ran into several folks this past week at OSCON who expressed a keen interest in creating a dedicated role for Open Source at their respective companies. So what was stopping them? One simple thing: every single one of them was struggling to define exactly what that role means. Instinctively we all have a feeling of what an employee dedicated to Open Source might do, but when it comes time to write it down or try to convince payroll, it can be challenging.
Note: This blog post and interview is cross-posted on Linux.com Starting an open source program office is a growing trend among companies that leverage open source software in their business strategies. Led by an open source program officer, open source offices can range in size from one or two advocates on an engineering team to an entirely separate R&D division. But the goal is the same: to strategically address common challenges companies face when adopting open source software.