Free flow of information: Open source in the company with InnerSource
There is hardly a large technology company that does not work internally with InnerSource structures. Despite all the advantages, the topic is largely unknown.
(Image: Scott Prokop / Shutterstock.com)
- Dr. RĂĽdiger Berlich
If you're not familiar with the term InnerSource, you're not alone. A survey conducted by the author among friends revealed that even people with decades of open source experience, including professional software developers and product managers, had at best a rough idea of what it meant.
Yet the term was coined over twenty years ago. Tim O'Reilly wrote in December 2000 about the relationship of OpenGL to open source: "Collab's [CollabNet was a company co-founded by O'Reilly] mission is to enable open source-style collaborative development for the software industry as a whole. Typically that involves helping large companies transition to open source. But we have also worked with companies on 'inner sourcing', as we call it, – which means helping them to use open source techniques within the company." The lack of awareness may explain why the concept tends to play a role in large companies and in proprietary software development.
The spelling of InnerSource without spaces was an attempt to improve the lack of visibility of the concept. The book"Adopting InnerSource" by Danese Cooper and Klaas-Jan Stol explains: "To make the term easier to find (if you try to search for 'inner source', you will only find results with no software reference), we removed the space in the middle and introduced CamelCase spellings." Today this is no longer a problem – Both Google and ChatGPT also provide suitable answers for "inner source".
Transferring open source concepts into the company
InnerSource addresses a fundamental problem in many companies, namely that knowledge and resources are fragmented. In established organizational structures, teams often work in isolation, which leads to duplication of work, knowledge silos and inefficient use of resources. In large companies, it is often easier for development teams to write a function themselves than to request it from other teams, whose code may then only fit halfway. This creates parallel worlds that become increasingly difficult to consolidate as complexity grows.
The InnerSource philosophy provides an alternative approach: it applies the open source principle "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers", which Eric Raymond described in his 1997 essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Applied to companies, it means making code available and promoting it within the company as soon as it is created. Contributors should not only come from within the company's own peer group, but ideally across departmental boundaries – but limited to the company's own organization. This helps to curb the number of newly emerging silos at an early stage and can – also be used in established projects with greater effort –.
If this internal community building is successful, it not only avoids isolated solutions, but the company also benefits from a second principle formulated by Eric Raymond: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", also known as Linus's Law. Quality increases and, at the same time, development is geared towards the real needs of users, which leads to a further increase in efficiency.
The FOSS Manifesto of Mercedes-Benz AG describes several principles, including
- Developers should first look for suitable open or inner source alternatives before developing or buying code themselves.
- Developers should get involved in the InnerSource community and contribute to projects.
InnerSource is not only en vogue at Mercedes. The consulting firm Gartner ranked the topic 7th in its Software Engineering Hype Cycle in 2023.
InnerSource Commons as a central point of contact
Open source pioneer Danese Cooper launched the cross-company and well-organized InnerSource Commons initiative in 2015 with the aim of collecting and disseminating knowledge about InnerSource. The initiative forms a central hub, publishes extensive information on the platform and presents the InnerSource patterns. They provide know-how for setting up and operating InnerSource communities. Interested parties can also find free books, case studies and a comparison with open source on the platform. The initiative also organizes events, such as the most recent online InnerSource Summit from 20 to 21 November 2024. The streams of the presentations, which are freely accessible via YouTube, are also a good source of information.
Videos by heise
The State of InnerSource Report 2024 published by the initiative provides a quantitative overview of the motives and implementation of InnerSource initiatives.
A lot of information can also be found in publications by SAP, which has actively taken up the topic. SAP 's project portal on GitHub served as a template for one of the commons patterns mentioned. In the abstract to his presentation "SAP's Repository Linter" at Summit 2024, Benjamin Ihrig, Cloud Native Developer at SAP, describes his employer's commitment as follows: "An essential part of our software development process is to promote collaboration, innovation and efficient code reuse."
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