Most literature around open source focuses on using open source
software (OSS). While the benefits of OSS are rapidly gaining
recognition, some smart organizations are going a step further and
applying the Open Source Development Model (OSDM) to solve problems
that have proved to be otherwise intractable. OSDM is based on
collaboration, community, and the shared ownership of knowledge.
Linux is one of the best examples of how this model works.
In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of
source code for Linux and licensed it under the liberal General
Public License that gave anyone permission to copy, modify, and
redistribute the code. The only condition was that anyone making
improvements to the software and redistributing the changes had to
share the improvements with the rest of the community. This liberal
license attracted thousands of contributors over the years, who
contributed their bit to improve the code base of Linux. A Linux
Foundation study found that Fedora, a community Linux distribution,
has now grown to contain almost 204 million lines of code.
There are two reasons why Linux and other OSS programs have
demonstrated such explosive growth. One is the growth of the
Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform in the
history of mankind, connecting 1.5 billion people across the world.
The other is the open, participative and distributed development
model of open source where users are actually encouraged to
contribute to the development of the software. This is in sharp
contrast to proprietary software that allows very limited rights to
users.
Some of the most savvy technology users are embracing the
participative nature of open source to build technologies that suit
their needs. For example, John O'Hara, senior architect and
distinguished engineer at JPMorgan, pioneered Advanced Message
Queuing Protocol (AMQP) as an open source project after being
frustrated with developing front- and back-office processing
systems at investment banks.
In 2003, O'Hara embarked on a quest to standardize
Message-oriented Middleware (MOM) technology, to enable mission
critical enterprise applications to send messages to each other in
a reliable and scalable manner. He decided to break from the past
by creating the AMQP protocol with the intention of making it
freely licensed. In 2006, he invited Red Hat to help him create a
governance structure based on open source principles.
For developing an early version of the software, O'Hara tapped
iMatix, a boutique European development house that had clearly
demonstrated a commitment to open source. In 2006, Red Hat's Carl
Trieloff submitted an AMQP based project called ‘Qpid’
to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)—which manages the
Apache HTTP Server, the world’s most popular web server, and
64 other open source projects. Qpid is now a Top-Level Project
(TLP) within ASF, signifying that the project’s community and
products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic
process and principles. The Qpid project continues to grow with
contributions from vendors ranging from Red Hat to Microsoft, and
users ranging from banks and telcos to consultants and small
businesses.
The AMQP project is a perfect example of what Eric Von Hippel,
Professor of Innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management, calls
“user-driven innovation.” In his book Democratizing
Innovation, Von Hippel says that OSS projects are exciting examples
of complete innovation development and consumption communities run
by and for users. Today, users like Credit Suisse, Deutsche
Börse Systems, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase Bank, the TWIST
consortium and others, partner with IT leaders like Cisco, Red Hat,
and Microsoft in the AMQP consortium (for further details, you can
refer to www.amqp.org).
Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Today,
AMQP processes billions of transactions per day and has many
implementations from Apache Qpid (qpid.apache.org), OpenAMQ,
RabbitMQ and many other clients and eco-system integrations. AMQP
can also be seen at work in many other projects like visualization,
(ovirt, libvirt), in grid computing (Condor), in rich integrations
in open source showing WS-DM, JMX, .NET, C++, Java, JMS, Python,
Ruby, etc. In a powerfully interconnected world, the OSDM used to
build AMQP demonstrates the power and value of collaborative
software development.
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