The Open Source world
How private companies are supporting the Open Source community
The open source software market is at an all-time high. Companies are starting to understand the power of the open source software community and they’re starting to get the people in the community more involved.
“The future is so bright, I think I’m going to need a new pair of shades,” said Professor George Thiruvathukal, from the University of Loyola, when asked about the future of open source software. He then added that small and large companies are using open source software, and the sky is the limit for the future of open source.
Open source software allows users to freely modify a project. Merging two projects, integrating some parts of a different project or simply changing some basic code are some of the ways that developers can contribute to open source software.
The communal aspect of open source software is huge. Allowing people to work on and develop a project to the specific needs of the community is what it is all about. This drives communities to become creative and technologically advanced.
However, it is not the only thing that drives developers to contribute to open source material.
People are now becoming more and more active in the open source community, allowing technologies to thrive and be much more efficient. Big name companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and many others have shifted gears when it comes to open source software. Tesla openly gave out all of their key information to their systems just so people could help by contributing their time and their knowledge to the project.
So why is this happening?
It is not simple, but there are some explanations. “Open source software allows companies to get feedback and modifications on software that they use,” said Kris Lee, a 38-year-old computer engineer at a finance company. Although the open source developer rarely gets any monetary contribution to their efforts, the power of these contributions alone drives people to contribute.
Avenues like GitHub allow developers to form a profile where anyone can both see the coders own projects and also see what projects the coder has created. This is a great motivator for people in this field. Having your name on a code that is being praised within the community is what people look up to. And the numbers are also pointing to this. The growing number of coders in GitHub can also be seen in many other areas. People are going to coding boot camps and learning to code at incredible speeds. In the US coding is being taught to children in the 5th grade. This opens a whole new world of opportunities to coders alike.
According to the 2016 Future of Open Source Survey conducted by Black Duck and North Bridge, 67% of companies that responded to their survey are actively encouraging developers to contribute to open source projects. This is a clear rise form 2014 when the same company conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of the companies used open source software.
Andrew Losowsky, who is a project director for The Coral project at Mozilla, said that there are both negative and positive aspects to open source software.
“The negative aspects mostly revolve around financial aspects and running a sustainable project. The positives are, adapting the code into what exactly fits the companies’ needs; transparency of the code, which adds to the trust that people have of the code, and allows people outside the project to contribute so that other fixes and features can be added that were not a priority for the company.”
“No closed- source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem,” wrote Eric S. Raymond, a software developer known for his views on open-source software, in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
“ Very few can bring 200 people who have contributed to Fetchmail! Perhaps, in the end, the open-software culture will triumph not because it is morally right […] but simply because the closed source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open source communities […].”
Where does GitHub come into play?
GitHub has been around since 2007. It is mainly used for code management. The code of a product can be shared on GitHub where anyone can Fork, Create or Pull from it. Allowing developers to contribute to the project without tampering with the original code.
Events are the bedrock of GitHub. They allow users to interact with the code safely. Pull Request Event allows users to request a merge with the original file. This request is then is looked at by other members and merged with the original if accepted. Fork request allows the person to get a copy of the project for themselves and creating an event is creating a new repository.
GitHub is not only used to edit code, but it is used as a resume for developers. All actions that a person has done on GitHub is tracked and saved. Everything is open to the public, allowing people to see the contribution a person has made throughout the years.
GitHub is rising in popularity since 2011 there is a steady rise in active users on GitHub. This is not only seen in numbers but it is also seen in practice. Google and Tesla are venturing in OpenSource software. This shows something about the community and the power that community has.
“Open source software is going to be the future for all companies; Microsoft and other major companies are already going in that direction,” said Gordon M., a 36-year-old software engineer. “That should be a sign!”
Gordon said that in the future all technology will be open sourced allowing companies to grow faster and better for the public and the companies themselves.
