The InnerSource Spain community had its first meeting, and we are already planning next steps. Let’s start by briefing first meeting outcomes.
Continue reading “InnerSource Spain, first meeting and next steps”
North Bridge and Black Duck published last January their 2016 Future of Open Source Survey Results with a lot of interesting conclusions. Maybe the biggest one it’s that Open Source continue gaining force inside the IT business, but its management is chaotic because the lack of process.
Most common problems related on the survey were:
Continue reading “4 Problems you might have doing open source in your company and how to solve them”
Not everything in inner source is about community building [but a big portion!] and the infrastructure is basic to foster collaboration, transparency and community building.
Continue reading “Key aspects when inner-sourcing your infrastructure”
We are pleased to announce that we are writing a book about inner source.
We have been collaborating for some months with companies that are developing this methodology to produce the software they need. They were pioneers who early on realized that inner source has lots of benefits for talent management, software development, and business improvement. And now others are asking us for advice about implementing inner source.
Continue reading “How, What and When Measure Inner Source”
[Extra material available at the Open Source Leadership Summit talk and its slides in the Bitergia’s Speakerdeck account]
Once again, Bitergia has been invited to participate in the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit (previously known as Linux Foundation Collaborative Summit). This time, we have new things to show, based in the work we are doing currently for The Linux Foundation and several of its collaborative projects such OPNFV, CNCF, OCI, Xen and Cloud Foundry (details to be published soon!).
In a recent post we’ve seen how to set up Inner Source in your company is a cultural change question. Companies need to increase inner transparency, confidence and collaboration for breaking the functional silos in order to create a proper environment to develop software between motivated peers and enable code/knowledge reuse.
Continue reading “Open Source community tools for Inner Source projects”
“The idea is beginning to take root in even the most secretive corporate cultures… Its power lies in the inherent social nature of the creative process. When developers are able to access, use and build upon what their colleagues are creating, innovation can really take hold.”
Phil Granof in Wired
As we detailed in the previous post, adopting Inner Source practices creates great benefits for companies such as saving cost, faster time to market and enabling innovation.
There’s no doubt that Inner source needs a different approach to project management but “hands on!” What’s the best project to start Inner Sourcing?
Software is becoming the core of most business, even the traditional ones. However it doesn’t mean that companies should build all the software they need, most of it can be easily bought or outsourced with low cost, in order to focus their efforts on their core business. Thus, Inner Source should help to add value to organizations running away from commodity.
This was the case for Philips Healthcare. Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald in their article Inner Source—Adopting Open Source Development Practices in Organizations recommended to start with a seed project. That means, not starting from scratch but choosing an existing initial implementation of a software product or component.
Frank Van Der Linden, CTO at Phillips was responsible for and pioneered the setting up Inner Source within the company. He decided to start with a component suite of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) standard, used in many medical imaging tools such as x-ray and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners. Philips Healthcare has a product line for diagnostic techniques in Hospitals, so they chose a core business software product for Inner Sourcing.
Van Der Linden reports enormous business benefits using Inner Sourcing as a process for developing:
Philips and other companies running Inner Sourcing learned from Open Source projects, they understood how to align and coordinate efforts. In the next post, we will talk about essential tools to enable Inner Sourcing.
In past posts, we talked about Inner Source and the benefits for your organization. Some large organizations, such Paypal or Zalando started their own process to approach Inner Source; we can say without a doubt that each of them has taken their own path, because Inner Source is more related to a philosophy or enterprise culture than to a process or static methodology defining it.
Inner Source (or Inner Sourcing) is a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2001 that referenced to the, “use of open source techniques within the corporation”
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Although more that 25% of the deployee code in the most influential IT companies was Open Source in 2015, IT departments didn’t show much interest in collaboration or innovation process. (Gartner, 2015).
Continue reading “InnerSourcing: the development model of the future?”
