Introduction

If “software is eating the world,” then maybe we can say that open source software is devouring it. While open source software is no new kid on the block (look at the rich history of the heavyweights in the room—Linux, for starters), current statistics around community participation, lines of code submitted, corporate involvement, and revenue impact are increasing at amazing rates. At LinuxCon North America 2015 in August, the Linux Foundation announced that over 64.5 million lines of open source code have been contributed into its own umbrella of projects, not including Linux itself! These contributions came from thousands of unique contributors, from students to corporate-employed software engineers, to the tune of a rough valuation of US$5.1 billion dollars of software components.

While this is interesting in and of itself, what is possibly more interesting is that open source is not just about lines of code hosted in public online repositories with reasonable open source licenses. Today’s open source, managed by open governance and collaborative foundations, is fueling a developer revolution across broad, worldwide communities to solve the next set of computing challenges around the cloud: from infrastructure services to platform and application packaging, to delivery and operational challenges in web-scale production applications.

This open source revolution is changing the landscape of how companies think about developing software, and specifically cloud solutions for their customer base. What we find is that this new era of openness is itself breeding open thinking and collaboration at a massive new scale among experienced developers who formerly were applying their expertise to similar, or even the same, challenges but within the proprietary confines of their own enterprises. Instead, we now are increasingly seeing openness as an explicit design point in software generally, and cloud computing specifically, for many enterprise organizations that would traditionally have “rolled their own.” We are calling this new era the time to be Open by Design.