Dive Brief:
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The world is becoming more open to "open source," said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, speaking at the All Things Open Conference last week, according to a Triangle Business Journal report.
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Open source is becoming "the default choice for a next-generation of infrastructure," Whitehurst said.
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While it started out focused around software, the idea of "open" has spread into other areas of technology, Whitehurst said.
Dive Insight:
Whitehurst pointed to recent examples in which Google, Microsoft and Facebook all made major moves around open source.
"They recognize the company that builds the community around that piece of technology, that technology is going to win," he said, according to the report. "I think it shows that there’s a growing recognition that the best way to innovate in these very fundamental areas is to do it in the open."
Enterprises are frequently turning to open source and third party software components to decrease the amount of code they have to write, which helps accelerate deployment cycles, according to Sonatype’s 2016 State of the Software Supply Chain.
Even large companies like Microsoft, which originally panned open source, have increasingly embraced the open source model over the past few years. Now, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects on GitHub over the last year.
Earlier this month, a bevy of large tech companies — including AMD, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA and Xilinx — announced they are banding together to launch an open specification to boost datacenter server performance.
