9 Tech Giants Embracing The Open Source Revolution
It was only 15 years ago that Microsoft's then-CEO likened open source software licenses to "a cancer." But today, Redmond is joining other tech giants in donating intellectual property to the hive mind of open source. Here's why it matters.
![](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt69509c9116440be8/bltcc56894149824bd3/64cb43781260a5f129a0b994/open-source-cacaroot-iStock_65483641_MEDIUM_RESIZED.png?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Open source software at one time was considered a fringe movement by some enterprise users and many tech vendors -- and that was at its best. Some leaders believed that open source software posed a subversive threat to industry and everything sacred.
In June 2001, Microsoft's then-CEO Steve Ballmer told the Chicago Sun Times that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
Fifteen years later, the world looks a lot different. Microsoft is moving much of its software to the cloud and changing the way it does software licensing. In a huge departure for the company that analysts acknowledge will open it up to more markets, Microsoft says it plans to put its SQL Server onto the Linux platform for the first time in 2017. The company has lost some enterprise deals because it wasn't on Linux, Gartner VP Merv Adrian told InformationWeek in an interview.
It's not only Microsoft. Open source is thriving these days, in part because of the growth of big data. Big data technology Apache Hadoop is celebrating its 10th birthday this year, and since its introduction, a whole ecosystem of technologies has grown up around it. Some of those technologies, such as Apache Spark, may be more powerful, mainstream, and game-changing than Hadoop itself.
[See Hadoop Ecosystem Evolves: 10 Cool Big Data Projects.]
Technology vendors are recognizing that by putting some technology into open source, they gain collaboration from other great minds to help the project mature more quickly.
Developers from different companies can collaborate on projects and develop solutions for the greater good of the entire community. That's not something that happens in a competitive commercial software market.
Proponents argue that open source solutions can evolve more quickly because so many minds are working to improve them. Plus, more organizations have access to the software because the licenses are free.
"We are trying to get machine learning tools to a wider audience so they can also feel that they can take advantage of the data they are capturing and not miss a beat," machine learning startup H2O.ai CEO SriSatish Ambati told InformationWeek in an interview earlier this year. His company offers an open source software distribution, too.
But many big companies are still hedging their bets with this strategy. While they may contribute some portion of code to open source, they are keeping the vast majority of their more sophisticated intellectual property in-house. Still, it's a changed world out there for open source. Here's a look at some of the contributions, big and small, from major technology vendors. Please add any that we missed to the comments section.
TensorFlow is Google's second-generation machine learning system that the company released to open source in November 2015 under an Apache 2.0 license. Google said that TensorFlow uses the technology for everything from speech recognition to the Google app to search in Google Photos. At the TensorFlow website, Google describes the technology as an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. The project was originally developed for machine learning and deep neural networks research.
Not long after Google's announcement about TensorFlow, Facebook made its own contribution, releasing its artificial intelligence hardware design code-named Big Sur to open source. Big Sur is an Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI at a large scale, according to Facebook. The server has been optimized for thermal and power efficiency, and it leverages NVIDA GPUs, according to Facebook. Facebook said it would submit these designs to the Open Compute Project.
IBM announced that it would donate its SystemML machine learning library to the ApacheSpark ecosystem in June 2015, and in November 2015 the contribution became an Apache Incubator project. IBM VP of product development for analytics Rob Thomas has called Apache Spark "the analytics operating system," and this machine learning library is designed to expand its capabilities.
Microsoft made its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit openly available to the developer community in November 2015, right around the time that Google and Facebook made their big AI machine learning open source moves. The toolkit is available on GitHub. It enables the use of multiple computers in parallel to solve complex problems.
The careers and professional social networking site has served as an incubator for a handful of technologies that have been contributed to open source. The most notable and successful so far has been Apache Kafka, a real-time big data pipeline technology that has gathered tremendous momentum in the last year. More recently, LinkedIn has contributed Kafka Monitor, a framework for monitoring and testing the availability of Kafka deployments.
LinkedIn has also released to open source a machine learning library for Spark called Photon ML. LinkedIn says this newly available library will help research engineers make more informed decisions about the algorithms they choose for particular efforts.
HP first released the application development framework Grommet under an Apache license in June 2015 -- before HP split into two companies. Now Grommet development is being driven by HP Enterprise. The technology enables non-technical people to provision compute infrastructure resources from a simple web interface. Organizations can easily create mobile and web apps for their infrastructure resources with control over everything from the technology to the user interface design choices.
Liota is a newly released open source technology from virtualization giant VMware. Liota stands for Little IoT Agent, and that's just what this vendor-neutral open source software development kit (SDK) is designed to do -- build a secure IoT gateway for data and control orchestration of applications. VMware says this tool helps you direct the gathering of data from attached devices and the transfer of that data to data center components. It's available on GitHub and works with any gateway or operating system that supports Python, VMware said.
EMC's Polly is an open source framework that enables storage allocation in scheduling environments such as Cloud Foundry, Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos. Named for "polymorphic volume scheduling," the framework implements a centralized storage scheduling services that connects to container schedulers. It can be used to offer resources to these schedulers. Another EMC open source project is called UniK (pronounced you-neek) and it provides cloud and IoT orchestration capabilities by bringing unikernel functionality to application platforms. EMC says the technology allows applications to be deployed securely, with minimal footprint across a variety of cloud providers, embedded devices (IoT), and developer laptops or workstations.
Another big data-driven project, eBay's Kylin, was born as a distributed analytics engine inside the online auction and marketplace company designed as a fast engine for business intelligence tools to access Hadoop data. The tool can help eBay get insight into sales trends and guide the company to allocating the correct resources to support the trend. Kylin is available on the Apache site.
Another big data-driven project, eBay's Kylin, was born as a distributed analytics engine inside the online auction and marketplace company designed as a fast engine for business intelligence tools to access Hadoop data. The tool can help eBay get insight into sales trends and guide the company to allocating the correct resources to support the trend. Kylin is available on the Apache site.
-
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like