The third and most advanced stage of engaging with open source is to create and lead open source projects. This often correlates with a taking on a larger role in the open source ecosystem, most notably by joining and actively participating, sometimes leading, open source foundations.
There are many reasons for why companies create and lead open source projects. Three important reasons for doing so are:
- Lowering the cost of development of non-differentiating software components by sharing the costs of development with other interested parties.
- Establishing de facto standards through widely used open-source software that works well with a company’s projects and products, saving more costs.
- Tapping into broad-scale innovation by the open source community in such a way that it benefits the company’s complementary products.
Small hobby projects on GitHub or GitLab are created as quickly as they are abandoned. Creating successful, long-term viable open source projects that fulfill the creator’s needs is a significant long-term investment and needs to be thought through from the beginning.
An open source program office (OSPO) collaborates with the main lines of business to identify their strategic needs for new open source projects and then helps them realize these projects.
A particularly important case of creating and leading new open source projects is the open sourcing of existing internal (closed) software. The OSPO works with the line of business to determine
- A proper home (on a company site or at an open source foundation)
- The extent of open sourcing (what and what not to open source)
- The extent of intellectual property made available (trademarks, patents)
- A time-line including staffing, launch, marketing, etc.
Open source foundations are non-profit organizations with the purpose of hosting and furthering open-source software. Such foundations are created to establish a fair and equal playing field for all parties interested in a particular open-source software. A well-run open source foundation ensures that the investment of the involved parties into some open-source software is safe.
Open source foundations are therefore the natural place for companies to go to and create new open source projects. Some of the large open source foundations have effectively become the host of whole platforms or layers of the technology stack that operate modern software systems. For example, the Apache Software Foundation is host to most of the open source data processing components, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is host to most of the managed cloud services components.
Open source foundations are natural partners to corporate OSPOs. The OSPO often provides non-technical guidance and staffing, establishes and supports the integration of line-of-business representatives into the open source foundations, and coordinates the interaction across the ecosystem, for example, between the components of an open source platform at an open source foundation.
© 2024 Dirk Riehle, used with permission.
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