The open source development model is taking over the enterprise. Two companies that were late coming to the OSS table but which now contribute much code are Cisco and Capital One.
The Video Screening Room
This panel discussion, recorded at this year’s OSCON in Austin, Texas, with two Cisco open source folks and a Capital One person is fascinating. Learn about how enterprises are acknowledging their use of OSS and taking greater responsibility for contributing back to it. Learn how people are more often using GitHub contributions as their resume. Learn how the open model allows companies to iterate faster in a rapidly changing world. If open source is becoming the default methodology, how is this changing mindsets within the enterprise?
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
OpenOffice, if you’ll remember, was forked by a group of developers who had been frustrated for years by roadblocks to what they saw as necessary development by Sun Microsystems, which had created the open source project out of Star Office, a proprietary suite it purchased in the late 1990s. When the situation worsened after Oracle took ownership, the developers created The Document Foundation, forked OpenOffice and released it as LibreOffice under the GPL. Improvements became evident right away, with much of the early work centering on cleaning up the bloated code base.
Let’s forget for a minute that I have plenty of reasons for seeing Redmond as a continuing threat to free tech. Let’s forget the patent issues the company still uses as a threat, as well as the fact that all of its contributions to open source are to support Azure and Windows, the latter of which remains proprietary and definitely not free software. Let’s also forget that this love of Linux was announced when Microsoft began betting on the cloud, where embracing Linux became necessary for survival. Can you imagine a Windows only cloud service? Neither can I.
