OSCON: Lessons Learned by Kirby Urner, Mentor, O'Reilly School of Technology
What the bigger enterprises are discovering, along with small and mid-sized, is that Open Source is not just end products, such as Perl and FireFox, but a way of working together to create those products, a supply chain, a process. In order to attract and keep the loyalty of engineers who work in the Open Source way, which has proved highly productive, the enterprise needs to not only use, but contribute to the Open Source commons. In supporting public projects, such as Asgard in the case of Netflix, OpenStack in the case of HP, Linux in the case of IBM, companies throw their hats in the ring, demonstrating they understand contributing source code is a way of earning good will, while reaping the benefits. Those who contribute quality code to the commons are seen as competent and powerful, using a currency engineers respect. Money is just data after all, whereas code is what harvests and controls data, moves it around in the cloud. Both Walmart Labs and Paypal, OSCON sponsors, provided eloquent testimony regarding their embracing of the Open Source way. Governments are not far behind, with the UK and US both sending heads of Digital Services departments to deliver complementary OSCON keynotes. Conway's Law states that organizations end up with systems reflective of their own internal communications. These days, staying nimble and on top of one's game, means adopting such Open Source practices as having "two pizza teams" (no bigger than might be fed on two pizzas) each tasked with maintaining and contributing features to smallish, well-defined products and services. Netflix sees the benefits of this design, with some teams committing new code at a relatively high rate compared to others. Loosely coupled services with managers highly aligned to company goals: that's a recipe for success. Monolithic proprietary applications, in contrast, tend to develop so many internal dependencies (including on a small cadre of indispensable programmers) that they encounter logjams in development. The whole enterprise bogs down. PayPal's name for adopting Open Source practices in-house is InnerSource. The core discovery is when engineers code on the assumption their code will be world readable, source open, they simply write better code. In practice, the sphere of projects supported by the Apache Foundation defines a ready-made commons. For PayPal, InnerSource means "Apache Inside" -- including such products as Spark and Tomcat, not just the famous web server. For WalMart Labs, the code base includes Node.js, Cassandra and Mongo. Engineers following the Open Source way do a better job at decoupling their projects, following the Unix philosophy of having many independent tools that each does something well-defined and discrete. The APIs are clearer that way. Innovation leverages the power of a community, including contributions from non-employees. When the license keeps the source open, the company partakes of greater positive synergies. Geniuses continue pouring their best thinking into vital enterprise assets, precisely because these assets are owned in common. No one may steal and possess exclusively of others: that's the hallmark of Free (as in liberated) Software. The Open Source approach is conducive to: (a) ownership by responsible teams, capable of responding to feedback (b) containerization and micro-services in the cloud, the most scalable and economical setting for enterprise computing (c) quick on-boarding of new talent, oft recruited from the community of contributers to one of these open projects a company values. The Open Source way includes using version control and such Agile techniques as test driven development (TDD is featured along our Python Track here at OST). As Allison Randal summarized recent history in her keynote: in the distant dino past of thirty years ago, a lot of people assumed Open Source was slated to always be playing catch up i.e. the "community edition" would always be second fiddle to what the closed source engineers were doing. That world view has been turned inside out in many critical domains, where open also means transparent, as in trusted, as well as best of breed. Who wants to build "the cloud" using tools owned and controlled by a tiny few? Open Source is a way to insure interoperability and hence long term profitability. Embracing the Open Source way is out of economic necessity, not just altruism. Open Source is about keeping control out of controlling hands and then competing (with "secret sauce" i.e. "value added") within that shared context. As it turns out, the business case for "keeping it open" is uber-compelling. OSCON's long list of big name sponsors is evidence of what's accepted as common wisdom these days: Open Source has won.
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