The Business Benefits of Open Sourcing

Many of the business benefits of using open source software are well known – cost, flexibility, interoperability and support. But what’s less discussed is why companies choose to take software their employees have developed on behalf of the company and make it free for anyone else to use.

My colleague Igor Perisic recently shared why open source works for LinkedIn, you should read his post. While I won’t retread his points, I will emphasize the benefits in helping grow and develop your engineers. When engineers have their code exposed to a large numbers of their fellow developers, they grow in their craft. On an open source project a developer has their name attached to the software they create, which gives them a strong incentive to write easily readable, well documented code.

Open source projects also play a role in the collaboration between companies. Every technology company faces a similar set of challenges as they grow and mature. This includes scaling, building efficient infrastructure, and collecting and analyzing data. While solving these challenges are necessary for a company to succeed, it’s usually not part of their “secret sauce.” Part of LinkedIn’s open source strategy was built on the idea that collaborating on projects and sharing information could be an incredible thing both for LinkedIn and for the tech industry. Our open source projects, from Kafka to Voldemort, Helix and our latest, Pinot, are all core pieces of our infrastructure, and we're excited to share these systems with the community.

Apache Kafka has taken on a life of it’s own, to the extent that several of the engineers behind the creation of it at LinkedIn - including Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao - formed a start-up called Confluent around Apache Kafka and realtime data. Jay shared a bit on the history of the project when he announced their funding.

I would encourage every engineering leader to consider the good that aggressively open sourcing their software could do for their business, their products, and their engineers.

I’m participating in a “Decoding Open Source” panel at the Bloomberg technology conference on Tuesday, June 16 at 4:05 pm on at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. Come hear more about how LinkedIn approaches open source software and how it’s helped us transform our company.