Open Source in Business

This week in class we each picked a video to watch from the podcast series “Open Source in Business.” This series, hosted by Dave Neary, sees figures from around the industry providing insights onto how open source fits into the company they work for. These comapnies include Comcast, US Bank, Microsoft, Netflix, and many more.

“Why should you have an Open Source Program Office?”

The video I chose to watch was on Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and how they can help your business. The guest speakers were Nithya Ruff from Comcast and Gil Yehuda from U.S. Bank. I won’t reiterate all the details of what an OSPO is for here- we talked about that in length last week (which you can see in my last blog post!)— but in short, they are a department designed to facilitate interactions between a company and the open source world, allowing them to make efficient and responsible use of the tools open source has to offer.

Ruff, from Comcast, noted that her company has a very interesting relationship with open source. While I don’t know much about the telecommunications/internet industry, I do know that a huge amount of the technology underlying the foundation it is open source. For Ruff, the goal of the OSPO isn’t as much to investigate and invest in new open source projects, but rather to make sure that the many projects that Comcast already relies on to deliver their product are supported and maintained. When I first heard of the idea of an OSPO it initially sounded pretty benevolent to me: “oh, a large company supporting open source? How nice of them!” Naturally, I thought that many companies wouldn’t actually create an OSPO, as benevolence rarely rakes in the money. Ruff’s experience, though, shows that OSPO’s are actually very practical and pragmatic “insurance systems” (just like Claude Warren talked about) for a company to make sure critical infrastructure is maintained. Benevolence isn’t really in the calculation— it just happens to work out for us common people that investing money into open source has actual returns for these companies!

Yehuda, from U.S. Bank, notes that he isn’t actually the head of U.S. Bank’s OSPO. They don’t have one! Instead, he is the “Head of Open Source Engineering and Technology,” and hopes to develop that department into a full-fledged OSPO. He never exactly elaborates on what needs to happen for it to become an OSPO, but based on what he said, I inferred that he doesn’t use the word “OSPO” because U.S. Bank doesn’t yet have a team of developers dedicated to open source development.- instead his department exists to weigh the benefits and risks of open source technologies in business decisions. Specifically, he talked about the “build versus buy” question— whenever a company needs some kind of tool, they have to evaluate what would be a better use of their resources: building it in-house, or buying it from someone else. Yehuda says that open source adds a level of complexity to this decision that his team helps navigate: how can building an in-house solution be made easier by starting from an open source foundation? If a solution they’re considering buying is build on open source, then does that provide an opportunity for customization? Does it present any risks if the project is no longer supported? Investigating these questions and converting them to a tangible cost breakdown to drive business decisions is what Yehuda’s department does.

One point Yehuda touched on very briefly caught my attention. He mentioned that open source is a vehicle for U.S. Bank to collaborate on software solutions with its competitors, whereas if they collaborated on a proprietary solution, they could be in violation of anti-trust laws. I was curious about this idea, so I did a bit of research on my own about it. Essentially, antitrust laws exist to stop companies from colluding in ways that harm competition- if two banks worked together to create software that only they can use, it would likely hurt other companies who don’t have access to the software. In contrast, when companies work together on an open source project, its available for anyone to use— this can actually increase competition by making advanced software solutions available to anyone who wants to use it. To me, this is a fascinating way open source serves to benefit everyone- companies get to pool their resources, create a better product, and anyone is able to access it.