How open source attracts some of the world’s leading innovators

How important is open source? According to a study from January 2024 Harvard Business School study, Rebuilding open source software (OSS) would cost $8.8 trillion If companies had to develop equivalent technology, at that cost, “96% of the demand-side value is created by just 5% of OSS developers.”

Who are these people working on open source? How did they get there? Where do they see open source going in the future? These questions and more were addressed this week at the UN. Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) for the common good conference in New York on several panels with some of the top open source leaders.

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David NalleyPresident of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS)He found open source like many programmers do. He was a programmer who wanted to solve a problem and found his answer in open source.

This is what Nalley found especially appealing: Even though he didn’t live or work in a tech hub, “I could go solve a problem without having to ask permission or live in San Francisco or New York.”

Nalley continued:

“I started contributing to other projects, and eventually got a job working on those open source projects. The most amazing thing for me as an individual was the opportunity to tackle difficult problems and then share the results. I started working with other people so they could solve their problems too. And that ability to not just solve a problem, but solve other people’s problems and work on fascinating problems was really cool.”

Those contributions led Nalley to the ASF, home to more than 320 open source software projects, including major products like the Apache web server, Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Tomcat. You may not know all those names, but you use all those open source programs and more every time you access the web.

Mike Milinkovichhe Eclipse FoundationThe CEO of , took a different path. He started out as a Fortune 500 tech executive, but “was fascinated by the idea of ​​communities coming together to productively develop software.”

Today, that notion is nothing new, but at the turn of the millennium, he noted, “it was a very, very different world. Open source was not as common.”

Fundamentally, he found “the idea of ​​building sustainable communities that work together productively to improve our societies and economies compelling.”

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Some stories of how people ended up in open source are stories that almost anyone can relate to. Demetris Cheatham, GitHubThe chief of staff to the CEO shared that she had grown up with a single mother and three children. She made $30,000 a year after graduating from high school. “I literally found a magazine that said what the highest salaries were for people who graduated in computer science, and that’s how I decided on my major, and it was transformative for me.”

Cheatham continued: “And when I learned about open source, I realized that it was the lowest barrier to entry for people who want to get into software development and computer science or just technology. It inspired me to bring people, especially from marginalized and underrepresented communities, into technology.”

Cheatham wasn’t the only one who realized that getting started in open source is relatively easy. Hillary Carter, Linux Foundation Senior vice president of research and communications, she said that in just eight years she was able to learn enough about open source to become a senior executive.

I’ve been covering open source since before the term was coined. One of its best features remains that you don’t need advanced degrees or coding skills to get where you need to be. As Carter noted, she had never submitted a single line of code to the Linux kernel, but she still became an open source influencer with a career.

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Once you contribute, you can do a lot with open source. In addition to illustrating potential corporate careers, one of the key points demonstrated at this UN meeting was that open source can serve the public good.

For example, Anir Chowdhurypolicy advisor to the government of Bangladesh, described how open source has provided the infrastructure needed by some 140,000 community health workers working door-to-door. Using open source software, developers created an affordable, portable computing solution to monitor the health of pregnant women and provide the data needed for decision makers to understand their overall health status.

The word “affordable” is crucial. In the US, we think of open source in terms of high-end infrastructure, like the cloud, or end-user devices, like Android phones and Linux desktops, and we pay a lot of money for this technology. Global SouthOpen source is a cheap way to solve important life problems, including tracking drinking water supplies, managing the spread of potentially dangerous pests, and analyzing the increasing dangers of climate change.

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That’s the good news. The bad news, as Sofia Vargasdirector of Google’s Open Source Program Office, noted that while the open source community is good at solving technical problems, it’s not so good at solving social problems. Perhaps that imbalance exists because it’s not necessarily the people who have the problem.

Bridging the gap between problems and solutions is a mission the UN is trying to address at this conference in New York, and the Linux Foundation is addressing this issue with its follow-up. What’s next for open source? meeting. Maybe you can help, even if you are not involved in open source today. The doors are open, the need is great, and you are welcome to join the open source community.