Can InnerSource bring open source practices to closed corporate bureaucracies?
Open source won. In the battle between software created openly by anyone who wants to contribute and those rigidly coded in closed shops, it was no contest. If you used closed source software and you wanted new features included or bugs fixed, you had to wait for the product to change, complain about it, or develop a workaround, hoping that the change made it into the product someday. With open source, you can participate by offering changes and improvements yourself, so long as you can show that you are willing to be part of their community.
Those closed software shops are starting to take notes and incorporate open source in their process. Not only are corporations open sourcing more and more pieces of their custom stack, they’re incorporating the techniques and processes that make open source so successful.
This is called InnerSource: open source software development within a corporate engineering organization. It’s an exciting shift in how software gets made and frees up individual contributors to make significant changes outside of their silo. To get a better sense of what these practices look like in the real world, we talked to Danese Cooper, founder and chairperson at InnerSource Commons and long time open source advocate.
