Open source is not a trust issue, it’s an innovation issue

It’s a culture thing

Achieving that cultural change can be critical when it comes to dealing with an increasingly volatile world, where organisations need to constantly innovate just to survive. 

In a panel on lessons from vertical industries, Mercedes-Benz open source programme lead Wolfgang Gehring said a modern vehicle was a datacentre on wheels, so “innovation and software [mean] open source”, and when it comes to common problems, “you can collaborate with other companies in the industry in open source”. Before open source, he added, “that was much more difficult”.

On the same panel, Karel Rietveld, Open Source Program Office lead at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, said motivations and inhibitions could be slightly different in the public sector, with different regulations and layers of management and compliance to be aware of. Open source might be more cost effective, a big issue for cash-strapped public entities, he added, but there was also the cost of publicly funded time and people to consider. 

But, of course, these are the already converted, and it might be argued that many critical sectors will continue to have an instinctive distrust of open source and be extremely unwilling to embed it in their systems. 

A glib response might be that few companies are not taking advantage of open source in some form anyway. That might be the CEO’s Android phone. Or it could be their use of cloud technologies or services which rely on a cloud native stack predicated on containers and Kubernetes, and open source security tools, and open source-powered developer workflows. 

For all the talk about community, sometimes it’s more base common interest that will drive a company or a sector to use open source. Finance is generally secretive, but increasingly is adopting open source. That’s not necessarily for any utopian ideals. Rather, banks and other financial institutions will have common problems to code for, in the shape of compliance with regulations for example, so it makes sense from an efficiency point of view to find common answers to these problems. 

Gabrielle Columbro, who heads up both the Linux Foundation Europe and the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), said if anything, financial services are ahead of “other traditional industries in their adoption and strategic understanding of open source”.

The sector is already highly tech-centric, he said, with banks potentially employing tens of thousands of developers. “And not only the big banks – we have the buy sides, Blackrock, Fidelity, five or six buy side members, and everyone in between. The clearing houses started coming in … so the whole ecosystem is starting to harmonise around open standards and open source.” 

Powering ahead 

The power sector is another “conservative” industry that is increasingly relying on open source as it races to rebuild its systems and infrastructure to meet the climate change challenge. This requires new ways of managing and predicting demand, and that means new tools – fast. As with finance, all operators face these problems, making cooperation easier to contemplate. 

Jonas van den Bogaard, open source lead at Dutch power distribution company Alliander, and a member of the technical advisory council at LF Energy, said the power distribution sector in Holland – likes its counterparts worldwide – is racing to decarbonise the grid and underpin electrification. As well as building out physical capacity, this will require much better tools for management and forecasting. 

“We are actively searching for collaboration and partnerships with industry players – with vendors, both academia and also cross-sector – to bundle resources, knowledge and expertise to realise these new digital integrations,” he said. 

“We’ve seen open source more as one of the means to make this possible, and it has been very successful for building up several capabilities.” 

And power is not the only critical infrastructure that will be relying on open source. 

Whatever works best

Timo Perala heads up Nokia’s open source projects office, having previously worked in standards. Ultimately, he said, its customers want products and services that work – they are not necessarily concerned whether they include open source elements, just as they wouldn’t necessarily care where Nokia sourced components like buts and bolts. 

Moreover, open source collaboration is a form of shared research and development, where everyone needs to solve a problem without necessarily capitalising on the solution. Perala likened it to how companies agree on a handover on a mobile network. “That is something that you just can’t charge for ... it’s a basic requirement, not a competitive advantage,” he said.

It’s hard to think of more conservative industries than power, finance and telecoms. But they are also industries that are facing high levels of disruption and a corresponding need to innovate quickly. 

If they’re building their businesses on open source, the only reason the rest of the world hasn’t is because they’re not being confronted with the same level of potential disruption. Yet. 

As Mercedes’ Gehring told his audience: “Innovation nowadays happens in open source. Innovation in software happens in open source. And you’re either there and you participate, or you’re not. That’s basically it.”