Marc Andreessen once famously said, “Software is eating the world.” He was right, software gobbled up industry sectors as varied as financial services, automotive, mining, healthcare, and entertainment. Companies of all sizes have leveraged software to improve their business processes and adapt products to a digital economy. And then a funny thing happened: open source ate software.
From startups to the world’s large corporations, commercial software is built on and with open source. In fact, open source now comprises 80 to 90 percent of the code in a typical software application. Today, most companies ship commercial products based on open source. If software is the engine of industrial-scale digital transformation, open source is the rocket fuel.
The fact is, no single company can compete with the rate and scale of disruptive innovation delivered by diverse open source communities. Not only has open source proven to be the most viable way of delivering complex platform software, but open source tenets like transparency, community-focus, inclusion, and collaboration have been adopted by organizations for building customer-centric strategies and cultures. According to research from Harvard Business School, firms contributing to open source see as much as 100 percent of a productivity boost.
Nowadays, organizations collaborate at open source foundations to gain a competitive edge. Industry leaders leverage participation in open source foundations to accelerate the market adoption of technologies, improve time to market, and achieve superior interoperability. At the Eclipse Foundation over the last 15 years, industry leaders like Bosch, Broadcom, Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, and hundreds more have collaborated under the Eclipse governance model to drive shared innovation and create value within a sustainable ecosystem.
Today, we are thrilled to release the Business of Open Source eBook focused on how successful entrepreneurs are leveraging all that open source has to offer to drive digital disruption within business-friendly open source foundations like the Eclipse Foundation. We call this class of innovators entr<open>eurs.
Entr<open>eurs understand the value of open source participation to develop products faster, mitigate risk, and recruit talent to gain a competitive edge. They fundamentally recognize the role of vendor-neutral, community-driven, and commercially-friendly open source foundations like ours to foster industry-scale collaboration, anti-trust compliance, IP cleanliness, and ecosystem development and sustainability.
As Todd Moore, IBM’s Vice President of Open Technology, explains in the eBook, “being a disruptor generally means that you have to move very quickly. You don’t develop all of the technologies that you’re employing. You’ve got enough mastery over them to quickly be able to assemble them. You’re using automation and deployment strategies that allow you to rapidly cycle through the code. What you start with and what you end up with at the end of the string can radically change.”
Download the Business of Open Source eBook today to learn how to innovate with confidence by giving your mission-critical projects a proper home at the Eclipse Foundation. Thank you to Deborah Bryant, Todd Moore, and Tyler Jewell for contributing their insights and expertise to the eBook. Let us know what you think and be sure to join the entrepreneurial open source conversation on Twitter @EclipseFdn and share your open source success story using #entropeneur.
To learn more about the business value of open collaboration at the Eclipse Foundation, visit entropeneur.org to explore our other commercial open source resources, including video success stories featuring Eclipse community members. We’ve also developed an infographic summarizing the benefits and advantages of participating in an open source foundation, and slide deck that you can use to make the case for joining the Eclipse Foundation.