Collaboration through open source development

Collaboration through open source development!

As the Open Source Initiative marks its 20th anniversary, demand for the open development process is stronger than ever. From small independent developers to the largest corporations; open source software is becoming de facto. The large IT companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat, have contributed their own projects to the community and even have dedicated developer resources for using their technology with open source.

For companies that aim to make a positive social or environmental impact on the world, we discovered that many of them run primarily on open source. Considering that several of these companies work with nonprofits that have limited budgets, open source makes good business and development sense. For these companies, collaboration through open source is vital in helping them to achieve their goals.

As a group, engineers are communal and unselfish. By nature, they like to share and help each other out. Engineers are willing to continue working on projects beyond their regular work hours; as an example, consider the contributions to open source software. Indeed, it’s not surprising to imagine that more open source software is running on the world’s computers than proprietary software!

We’re seeing an incredible efflorescence of technologies appearing out of nowhere and taking off virally. In most cases, none of this would happen without open source software. Only through open source can an individual or a small team with limited resources and great ideas build something novel and scale it to handle a rapidly growing user base. People can build an entire technology stack on top of open source software. Open source has proven its worth and is one of the fundamental reasons why the Internet continues to grow as it has.

Most open source projects are hosted on publicly available sites. For example, on GitHub, you can see the percentage of code that is contributed by percentage of people. What you don’t see, but soon realize is that behind every great open source software are Herculean efforts by a few people who are exceptional at what they do. We’re fortunate in this industry to have many of them who want to share their accomplishments with others.

How does open source software affect your business?

This article was brought to you by the senior management team at Source Coders.