Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

I had a fantastic time at OSCON last week. It was a crazy busy week for Twitter announcing that we are helping form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and unifying some of the work that has been going on in the Kubernetes and Mesos ecosystems:

we're joining the CNCF! we're looking forward to seeing the #k8s and @ApacheMesos communities collaborate together https://t.co/0ealhBNwqg

— Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) July 21, 2015

It’s rare that you see two communities and the large companies behind them put their egos besides and do what is better for everyone in the long term in the infrastructure space. We also formally joined the Open Container Initiative and plan on donating an AppC C++ implementation in the future:

we are happy to officially join and support the Open Container Initiative at #OSCON https://t.co/3iNpE6pYVg

— Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) July 22, 2015

Thank you to everyone who came to our ping pong tournament party and learned a bit more about the sport of table tennis:

#twitteroscon #PingPong doors are open & competition is fierce! pic.twitter.com/WjSAabhW9u

— TwitterDev (@TwitterDev) July 23, 2015

We also had a great @TODOGroup panel at OSCON discussing how different companies are running and establishing open source offices… along with what works and some lessons learned:

Twitter's OSS lead @cra on the @todogroup panel at #oscon – sharing insights on running an Open Source program pic.twitter.com/0Ka9dsZxXO

— TwitterDev (@TwitterDev) July 22, 2015

Finally, thank you to everyone who came to my talk about lessons learned from Twitter creating its open source office on Thursday:

@oscon slides finally posted, thank you to who came! http://t.co/mL1vi4mQFP

— Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) July 24, 2015

It’s always amazing to see how many companies are starting to form open source offices, from my talk I tried to highlight some of the better known ones from larger companies and even startups (along with their mission statements):

• Google: https://developers.google.com/open-source/
  • “…tasked with maintaining a healthy relationship with the open source software development community”
• Intel: https://01.org/
  • “…international team dedicated to working within open communities.”
• Samsung: http://commit101.org/
  • “The Open Source Group was formed in 2013 to do the following: Help guide the company in effective consumption, collaboration, and development of open source software. Provide advocacy on behalf of Samsung in external open source communities. Develop consistent open source strategy and governance policies for the enterprise at large.”
• Microsoft: https://microsoft.com/opensource
  • “Microsoft’s commitment to openness and collaboration is ingrained… These collaborations have enabled new scenarios for customers and partners to take open source software and integrate it with a Microsoft platform.”
  • http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-microsoft/
• Box: http://opensource.box.com/
  • http://todogroup.org/blog/creating-an-open-source-office-box/
  • “we give back to the open source community whenever possible, by contributing code to outside projects and sharing projects that we’ve developed internally”
• Dropbox: https://opensource.dropbox.com/
  • “Dropbox loves open source! We participate in the open source community by using open source software internally and open sourcing our own projects”
• Facebook: https://code.facebook.com/opensource
  • “…we’re keen users and publishers of open software. We’ll keep you up-to-date with our new projects and releases…”
• GitHub:
  • http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-github
• Twitter:
  • http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-twitter/

I really expect this trend to continue in the future, for example Box is looking to hire their first Head of Open Source and even  Guy Martin was just hired to create and run an open source office at Autodesk… Autodesk!

My first week here @autodesk & already finding cool #OSS work we are doing. I’ll be on the hunt for more! 🙂 https://t.co/cXiRUgLgKR

— Guy Martin (@guyma) July 17, 2015

At the end of the day, as more businesses become software companies to some nature, they will naturally depend on a plethora of open source software. Businesses will look to find ways to build better relationships with the open source communities their software depends on to maximize value for their business, it’s in their best interests.