SE Radio 579: Arun Gupta on Open Source Strategy and Community

Arun Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel Corporation, discusses open-source strategy and community with SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi. They explore the business case and business model for why and how big tech participates in the open-source ecosystem. Arun describes ways to foster a culture of engagement with open source within companies such as Intel, Amazon, and Apple. They then consider how the principles can be applied to closed-source software within a company. Finally, they discuss some of the benefits that Intel has gained from more than 20 years of open source contributions and look at the company's plan for the year ahead. SE Radio is rought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.

Arun Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel Corporation, discusses open-source strategy and community with SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi. They explore the business case and business model for why and how big tech participates in the open-source ecosystem. Arun describes ways to foster a culture of engagement with open source within companies such as Intel, Amazon, and Apple. They then consider how the principles can be applied to closed-source software within a company. Finally, they discuss some of the benefits that Intel has gained from more than 20 years of open source contributions and look at the company’s plan for the year ahead.

Show Notes

Related Episodes‌

• SE Radio 327: Glynn Bird on Developer Productivity with Open Source

• SE Radio 192: Open Source Development: Perspectives from Management Science

Transcript

Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number and URL.

Kanchan Shringi 00:00:19 Hi all. Welcome to this episode of Software Engineering Radio. Today we have Arun Gupta discussing open source strategy and community. Arun holds the position of vice president and general manager of Open Ecosystem initiatives at Intel Corporation. Arun has over two decades of experience as an open source strategist, advocate, and practitioner. He has successfully guided companies like Apple, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems in adopting open source principles. Welcome to the show, Arun. Is there anything else you’d like to add to the bio before we get started?

Arun Gupta 00:00:51 No Kanchan, I’m super happy to be here and very excited.

Kanchan Shringi 00:00:55 Awesome. So our goal today is to really drill into how big tech participates in the open source ecosystem, and I’d really like to first start with telling our listeners about some episodes that we have that they might want to listen to that handle and talk about open source. These are episode 94 on Open Source Business Models, episode 327 on Developer Productivity and episode 192 on Open Source Development Perspectives. So can we start with the business model and the business case? Why does big tech participate in the open source ecosystem?

Arun Gupta 00:01:37 Yeah, having done open source at a wide range of companies like Apple, Amazon, Suns, which are really big tech companies and rather smaller company like Couchbase, their business cases are very different. And I’ve seen very clearly that the reason that they participate in open source, it only sustains if it is very clearly tied to the business case. Like take a look at Amazon for example, right? At Amazon, I was part of the open source strategy team where I was on the loan to different service teams, helping them build and craft their open source strategy. So to begin with, I was with the containers team, this is the time when we were starting Amazon EKS. Amazon EKS is directly built on top of Kubernetes. So it’s very essential, very critical that we participate in the Kubernetes community because the issues that Amazon was facing at that point of time were very specific to Amazon because you’re building a managed service.

Arun Gupta 00:02:40 The scale is very different, the problems are very unique. And so in an open source community, you can’t just file a bug and say somebody else will fix it up. There is no magical community. The magical community actually consists of all these people from these different vendors that are making the community move forward. So you have to understand the social dynamics, you have to understand what are the key players in the community, what is it that is of priority in the community, just like any other commercial entity, you got to do that in your own company. But now you got to do that in a very open, transparent manner in the community. And that’s sort of the strategy is what I was building for Amazon. So Amazon is very customer obsessed company in that sense. They were contributing to the open source projects where their customers wanted them to be successful.

Arun Gupta 00:03:32 So more often than not, they will create integrations with their existing services and that’s where they will contribute to the open source projects. So that pick an open source project, my SQL, Postgres, Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra, they will make that run on a scale. In order to run it on their scale, they need to make sure there is no technical debt inside Amazon and all the work that they’re doing is contributed upstream so that it stays up in the community as well. So that’s the reason Amazon was doing it. If you think in terms of Apple, the reason Apple was contributing to open source is because a lot of open services at Apple runs using Java. So they need to make sure that they can bring in the latest changes from Java and run it in the most optimal manner. A lot of the services run on Kubernetes, same thing.

Arun Gupta 00:04:26 You don’t want to maintain an internal fork if Kubernetes has more than 4,000 developers, rather more than 60,000 contributors coming from over 4,000 companies. You can’t have that level of engineering resources inside the company. And the core product of Apple is very different. So it helps them with that undifferentiated heavy lifting that lets bring that collective wisdom, collective power, collective knowledge of the community and bring it in home and then leverage it. 90% of the job is already done out there. We just need to do 10% more as opposed to doing it in-house. Let’s do that in the community so that we can continue to leverage the latest innovation that is happening in the community. Here I’m at Intel. Intel has been a long-time contributor to open source for over 20 years actually. Just about the time that I was joining the open source movement.

Arun Gupta 00:05:22 So they’ve been doing it longer than that as a matter of fact. Our primary Intel is a silicon company and the primary means our customers consume our product, which is an Intel silicon, whether it’s in the client, in the Edge, in the data center, in the private Cloud whatever, the primary means they consume it is using all of these open source projects, hundreds of open source projects. So in order for them to make sure that that open source project continues to run in a most optimized manner, that’s exactly the reason Intel contributes to these open source projects. Because we have new instruction set coming out in a chip we have new features coming out in the chip, we want to make sure like those features are available in Linux kernel in open JDK, which is a Java reference implementation in Python, in TensorFlow, in Cassandra, in Kafka, you pick a project, Intel contributes to 300 plus such projects.

Arun Gupta 00:06:22 So if you see the primary reason these companies, just like Intel is contributing, is to be aligned with their business case. And that’s the only way I’ve seen it sustained. And there are places where I’ve seen where you are contributing on the fringes, and it stays on the fringes and it doesn’t become either your strategy or a culture is sort of a tactic to handle it. And I’m really excited that I am at Intel here because, the leadership truly gets it. Thatís why we contribute to open ecosystem, why it matters to us.

Kanchan Shringi 00:07:01 Okay, makes sense. You mentioned community knowledge, so that’s adding to the knowledge of people within the company. So it’s intellectual knowledge, but what about intellectual property?

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