Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone's building open-source software
Summary: In the opening keynote at LinuxCon, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin observed that open source is now key to how all companies use to develop software—and yes he meant Apple, Microsoft, and VMware as well.
San Diego, CA: At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation's annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin's, the Foundation's executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”
Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it's because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”
He then showed a slide of half-a-dozen smartphones that were turned off and pointed out that even with a very technical crowd, “If you just look at the hardware of smartphones, you can't tell them apart, it's only when you turn them on that you can tell the differences.”
Zemlin said that all successful tech companies are now using and contributing to open source communities. “Besides the usual suspects--Amazon, Google, IBM-- there are companies that you may not think of as being big open-source companies, even competitors, now admit that they must participate in open source.”
Like who? Zemlin pointed out that "Microsoft is now supporting Linux in their cloud. Not because they want to, but because their customers demand it.”
In addition, VMware just acquired Nicira, an important OpenStack. Indeed, VMware, a champion of the closed virtualization and cloud position, has just submitted an application to join the OpenStack Foundation.
Even Apple, Zemlin observed “one of the most closed companies in the world, uses a lot of open source. If you look inside the Apple's iPhone legal agreements you'll find GPL code there.” In addition, “Apple bought CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), an open-source project” a few years ago. So while Apple may be closed, it certainly understands the value of open source. Indeed, Mac OS X is built on a foundation of Darwin/Mach—BSD Unix-based operating systems.
Zemlin's not the only one seeing this marriage of open-source and corporate IT. Tim Yeaton CEO of Black Duck Software recently blogged, “Corporate IT has made extensive use of open source code for years. Gartner reported that on average, 29% of deployed code was open source, and that by 2015 at least 95% of mainstream IT organizations will leverage open source solutions within mission critical software deployments. So while open source code is being widely adopted, it’s only recently that corporate IT became interested in the efficiencies of the open, collaborative creation process itself. Projects spin up quickly and attract contributors organically without advertising or hiring; large distributed teams produce high quality innovative code with little overhead; and it’s all done completely in the open.”
“Open collaborative development via communities is widely understood and accepted, and corporate IT organizations are realizing that these characteristics can be applied to improve their internal development as well, and many are looking to apply them to enhance their own internal methods, typically in conjunction with adopting agile or lean methodologies.”
In short, welcome to IT software development in 2012, welcome to open source.
Related Stories:
Linux Foundation to host CloudOpen to mitigate open source cloud war
Enterprises see growing open source cloud appeal
Open-Source virtualization management coming for KVM, Xen and VMware
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Talkback
So where exactly did he say it was "key" to how companies like MS
"Have to" because "their customers demand it"
customers really don't care whether it's open source or not
true Yawner.
I don't claim to know WHY they are using Open Source.
So you admit Linux works well
i dont like you
Speak English, you fool
Re: customers really don't care whether it's open source or not
Mr. Lube?
Plenty of car buyers wouldn't care, actually. Other than adding oil, antifreeze, and gasoline, plenty of car owners *never* so much as change a light bulb on their vehicles, opting instead to let the "experts" at their local 15-minute oil-change place do it for them (for an exorbitant fee, of course).
Apple are the pinnacle of "no user-serviceable parts", and they are hardly hurting for sales. It appears that consumers like to consume, and leave the dirty work to the grease monkeys.
We're not talking about consumers...
Bad Analogy.
a true analogy to the local service station would be the computer shop down the street, or possibly your nephew, the high school computer nerd.
Everyone?
Who are these everyone?
Apparently, they are MS's own customers.
Yes, everyone
I'm curious
Why do you assume that William Farrel is a real person, and not just some random Bot?
There's never any way of knowing for sure.
I also see no reason to assume that his/her real name is actually "William Farrel" either, or that a single person is using that account to post messages here. So I just take everything from that account with a bucket (or two) of salt and then move on.
Nobody demands it
You misread the article.
"Zemlin pointed out that 'Microsoft is now supporting Linux in their cloud. Not because they want to, but because their customers demand it.'"
Tell that to Cadillac...
Are you really insisting that companies don't care about having access to source code for customizing, security or support reasons?
Bad Assumption
You assume that means computer users who have windows boxes. WRONG!!!
Microsoft only cares about those who pay them money, not those who already paid. Microsoft is really just like any other corporation. It isn't the home/small business users, it's the Government and large Corporate users who have nice fat support contracts. If they are not happy, they do not renew. It is during the renewal period that these folks can exert pressure where Microsoft feels it.
They can they do and they did. Now do you understand?