It’s unlike anything else in any industry.
Open source software can turn individual developers into influencers overnight. Free enterprises from decades-long licensing dependencies. Turn startups into publicly traded companies in no time.
But it’s not new.
The practice of openly sharing code, allowing others to advance it with incremental contributions, and monetizing the deployment and/or support of it has actually been around for a while. Its recent popularity has simply pulled back the curtain to reveal its emergence in all variants of software stacks, democratizing the innovation around operating systems, applications, mobile platforms, services, languages, frameworks and tools.
There’s a utopian vibe to open source activity—a collective momentum that works for the betterment of all. Individuals and contributors can use or steer the project to fulfill their needs; meaning what you put in benefits you and all others.
And it doesn’t matter who you’re working with.
I’ve talked at meetups where developers and data scientists sit side by side, advancing the same project despite the fact that they work for competing companies. Taking part in an open source project really means everyone is in it together.
It’s a philosophy that is capturing the mindshare of increasing numbers of companies, including Intel’s long-term partner Microsoft, who recently released .NET Core 1.0, an open source software development platform that runs on both Linux and Mac OSX.
This was welcome news to the dozens of data scientists and developers I engaged with at the recent Spark Summit West event (I was there demo’ing the Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) in a booth that shared its border with the Microsoft booth). The general consensus: “Great news!”
Obviously that’s just one example. If you look hard enough at many successful technology companies, whether built on software or hardware, you’ll likely find some pedigree of open source activity.
At another recent event, OSCON, I had the opportunity to interview with O’Reilly’s Mike Hendrickson. Here, I was asked about Intel’s involvement in open source, including our significant contributions to many analytics-related projects and incubation of TAP. You can watch the full video below:
Company involvement in open source can be a point of great pride for those that take part. Large companies can tweak elements of open source to allow users to maximize their use of code and the project or library’s performance on underlying hardware. It’s a way to gently reach into what everyone wants to build on—and provide a foundation for even greater success.
I’m looking deeper into various examples of open source benefits and look forward to posting my findings. For a more in depth look at Intel’s other open source projects, please visit http://01.org.
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