<div dir="ltr"><div>OSCON: Lessons Learned<br></div><div>by Kirby Urner, Mentor, O'Reilly School of Technology<br><br><br><br></div>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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><div><br></div>Conway's Law states that organizations end up with systems reflective of their own internal communications.<br><br>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.<br><br>Netflix sees the benefits of this design, with some teams committing new code at a relatively high rate compared to others. <br><br>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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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.<br><br>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. <br><br>Innovation leverages the power of a community, including contributions from non-employees. <br><br>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.<br><br>The Open Source approach is conducive to: <br><br>(a) ownership by responsible teams, capable of responding to feedback <br>(b) containerization and micro-services in the cloud, the most scalable and economical setting for enterprise computing <br>(c)
quick on-boarding of new talent, oft recruited from the community of
contributers to one of these open projects a company values.<br><br>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).<br><br>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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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.<br><br>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.</div>