Category:OpenDevOps

As software engineering has become increasingly complex, the Open Source ecosystem has evolved along with it. From the early days with an open source set of command line tools, developer libraries, and an OS kernel, through the development of network services, and on to desktop applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and KDEnlive. I think the next "most important battleground" is enterprise application development.

To develop enterprise grade software, you need a suite of applications that work together. To continue bringing engineers into Open Source development, the tools engineers are using on a day-to-day basis to be Open Source. If we cannot demonstrate, in the office, that Open Source produces viable software, it is hard to make the case that it is. Conversely, if engineers are using and relying on Open Source every day, they will be more inclined to see it is an important thing in their lives, and they will be more likely to contribute.

A DevOps ecosystem for remote teams includes a number of components:

1. Forum server, for discussing topics that evolve over days or weeks.
2. Chat system, for immediate interaction.
3. Videoconferencing, for video interaction.
4. Wiki server, for long-term evolving information provision.
5. Network-enabled office suite, for collaborative document development.
6. Real office suite, for making high quality docs.
7. Source code repository, for version control.
8. Ticket tracker, for change requests.
9. Kanban board, for project tracking.

And there is one thing that Open Source can do better than proprietary: Platform Interoperation.

Proprietary software has an inherent limitation in the ability to do network-based interoperation. Their software cannot interoperate as easily as Open Source because engineers from Microsoft who need a feature in an Adobe product can't just jump into the code and make the change. They can't even go randomly looking around at Adobe's code to see what integration would look like - it's proprietary.

In Open Source world, anyone working on any piece of OpenDevOps can work on them all, or they can talk with counterpart engineers in an open forum without having to sign NDAs, and with the ability to point to specific lines of code or revision diffs. Open Source encourages development of interoperability in a way that proprietary software cannot.