The Future Of Emerging Technologies Is Open Source

By Jason Compton

You can explore the widespread impact of open source in the legal notices screen of any modern smartphone. You’ll scroll through page after page of credits and acknowledgments to dozens of projects representing thousands of contributors.

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In fact, just about every technology we take for granted, from smart televisions to cloud servers, relies heavily on open source software. Software’s significance in the digital transformation of large businesses expands the importance of open source.

“It’s a different world compared to even a decade ago. Open source plays a big role not just in individual components or pieces of a business, but also in driving outcomes for business itself,” said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of the Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) group at Cisco.

How To Play An Active Role In Open Source

Enterprises already consume open source services daily—through devices, networks and distributed computing resources.

Investing in open source—and helping its communities of shared interest and development thrive—is a different level of commitment. Shannon McFarland, chief architect for ET&I at Cisco, described it as a way enterprises can more directly address their digital transformation needs.

“In open source, you don’t have to beg a vendor for a specific feature critical to your business,” he said. “You can write that feature or collaborate with people to get help writing a feature that also matters to them.”

Open source investment is also a risk management strategy. A closed-source vendor can walk away from its products at any time, leaving little recourse. Open source reduces the prospect of a product suddenly becoming obsolete. A well-supported open source project with strong heterogeneous support from individuals, enterprise developers and a foundation or formal community adds stability and resilience.

Although it’s easier than ever to join open source projects and dive into the codebase, enterprise contributions to open source development aren’t limited to code. Documentation, promotion, bug reporting and testing are all valuable forms of open source sweat equity.

Enterprises, however, should spend time vetting the culture and transparency of an open source community before committing. They should also assess whether the project is very narrowly managed or is driven by internal politics rather than shared technological goals.

“You can join their calls, look at their Slack or Discord channels and weekly stand-ups, and see what the community is about,” McFarland said. “Do you see representation from individuals, universities, researchers and vendors?”

How Cisco Backs Open Source Innovations

Cisco aims to model healthy open source participation by investing time and energy in projects where it can offer expertise, insight and innovation but are not necessarily a direct extension of its commercial priorities.

“We believe that any open source project we [join] needs to solve a pain point independent of any agenda Cisco might have,” Pandey said. “Going in with an agenda never gets you open source success.”

For example, Cisco’s support of the KubeClarity project reflects growing industry-wide interest in understanding the full implications of distributed computing sourced from a variety of cloud vendors. By helping define a software bill-of-materials, enterprise users can better track the potential risks of cloud solutions, including potential privacy risks and support shortcomings.

“We help customers understand how to gain value out of open source and provide safety mechanisms around support and security, so they know which are the stable open source projects they can participate in,” McFarland said.

Another open source solution, APIClarity, is designed to help enterprises understand potential weaknesses or points of impending failure in the application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect disparate cloud solutions. This helps ensure that services are not interrupted by out-of-date program calls or poorly-documented API changes by a cloud vendor.

To learn more, see the complete roster of Cisco’s supported open source projects. In addition to directly contributing to these projects, Cisco’s ET&I group provides software and SaaS services to discover, connect and secure mission-critical cloud applications with foundational open source project components.

How Open Source Creates Competitive Advantage

Contributing to open source projects does not necessarily mean giving up a profitable advantage or a valuable secret. Converting enterprise data into insights and action is more valuable in the long run than a proprietary algorithm. So, investing directly in the open source tools that transform that unique data into value serves the broader enterprise community as well as your own aims.

There are also several opportunities to monetize innovations you create in open source space. “Open source helps you drive adoption and validate your product’s market fit,” Pandey said. “And then you monetize through innovations and support that you build around that open source project.”

Pivoting to open source can also enhance your human capital. Companies seeking to thrive in the next decade need to prioritize upskilling to meet the demands of their customers.

“Participating in open source is a phenomenal way to upskill your organization,” Pandey said, noting the comparative ease in hiring and retaining engineers with open source experience versus the smaller universe of those with closed source and proprietary expertise.

From cloud native development and AI/ML to API security, observability and more, check out these open source projects at Cisco for more information.

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