Dive Brief:
-
Open source is a "core building block" for Target's technology strategy, said company CIO Mike McNamara in an interview with The Enterprisers Project.
-
McNamara touted open source technology and said at Target they consistently seek "the open source community more than anywhere else for innovation in technology, because that tends to be where it's coming from."
-
As part of his team's dedication to open source, Target engineers also ensure they regularly contribute back to open source projects, McNamara said.
Dive Insight:
McNamara has been an advocate of open source since he joined Target in 2015, two years after a data breach compromised 40 million credit- and debit-card accounts at the company.
Enterprises are turning to open source and third party software components to decrease the amount of code they have to write, which helps accelerate deployment cycles. In fact, the dramatic rise of open source means very little software is written from scratch anymore. With open source, developers can use other code as a base and build upon it.
In 2015, developers had 31 billion download requests of open source and third party software components, compared to 17 billion requests the year before, according to analysis from Central Repository.
