How open source attracts some of the world's top innovators

How big a deal is open source? According to a January 2024 Harvard Business School study, rebuilding open-source software (OSS) would cost $8.8 trillion if companies had to develop equivalent technology. Of that cost, "96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers."

Who are these people working in open source? How did they come to be there? Where do they see open source going next? These questions and more were addressed this week at the UN Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for Good conference in New York in several panels featuring some of open source's top leaders.

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David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open-source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), found open source the way many programmers do. He was a programmer who wanted to solve a problem and found his answer in open source. 

Here's what Nalley found especially appealing. Even though he neither lived nor worked in a tech hub, "I could go fix a problem, and I didn't need to ask for permission or live in San Francisco or New York City."

Nalley continued:

"So, I began contributing to other projects and eventually became employed to work on those open-source projects. And the stunning thing for me as an individual was the opportunity to tackle hard problems and then share the results. I came to work with other people so that they could also solve their problems. And that ability to not just solve a problem, but solve other people's problems and work on fascinating problems was great." 

Those contributions led Nalley to the ASF, home to over 320 open-source software projects, including major products such as Apache web server, Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Tomcat. You may not know all those names, but you use all those open-source programs and more every time you use the web. 

Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, took a different path. He started as a Fortune 500 tech executive, but he "was fascinated by the idea that communities come together to develop software productively."

Today, that's hardly a novel notion, but around the turn of the millennium, he noted, "It was a very, very different world. Open source was not nearly as mainstream". 

Fundamentally, he found "the idea that building sustainable communities working productively together. for the betterment of our societies and economies was compelling."

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Some stories of how people ended up in open source are stories to which almost anyone can relate. Demetris Cheatham, GitHub's chief of staff to the CEO, shared that she had grown up with a single mom and three kids. She was making $30,000 a year after graduating high school. "I literally found a magazine that says what the top salaries were for people getting a computer science degree, and that's how I decided on my major, and it was transforming for me."

Cheatham continued, "And when I learned about open source, I learned it was the lowest barrier to entry for people who want to participate in software development and computer science or just technology. I was inspired to get people, especially from underrepresented and marginalized communities into technology."

Cheatham wasn't the only one to appreciate that starting in open source is relatively easy. Hillary Carter, Linux Foundation senior VP of research and communications, said that in only eight years she was able to pick up enough about open source to become a senior executive.

I've been covering open source since before the term was coined. One of its best features continues to be that you don't need advanced degrees or even coding skills to go places in open source. As Carter noted, she'd never submitted a single line of code to the Linux kernel, but she still became an open-source influencer with a career.

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Once you're contributing, you can do a lot with open source. Besides illustrating potential corporate careers, one of the key points demonstrated at this UN gathering was that open source can serve the public good. 

For example, Anir Chowdhury, a Bangladesh government policy advisor, described how open source has provided the infrastructure needed by about 140,000 door-to-door community health workers. Using open-source software, developers created an affordable wearable computing solution to monitor the health of pregnant women and provide the data needed for decision-makers to understand the overall state of health.

The word "affordable" is critical. In the US, we think of open source in terms of high-end infrastructure, such as the cloud, or end-user devices, such as Android phones and Linux desktops -- and we pay serious money for this tech. For the Global South, open source is a cheap way to solve major living problems, including tracking potable water supplies, dealing with the spread of potentially dangerous pests, and analyzing the ever-increasing dangers of climate change. 

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That's the good news. The bad news, as Sophia Vargas, a Google Open Source Programs Office manager, pointed out, is that while the open-source community is good at solving technical problems, it's not as good at fixing social problems. Perhaps that imbalance exists because they're not necessarily the people who have the problem. 

Bridging the gap between problems and solutions is a mission the UN is trying to solve at this conference in New York, and the Linux Foundation is addressing this issue with its follow-up What's Next for Open Source meeting. Perhaps you can help -- even if you're not involved in open source today. The doors are open, the need is great, and you're welcome to join the open-source community.