The key to the development of the next generation

I recently made the leap from Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to managing an open source project, to Puppet, an independent, privately held company that offers both open source and commercial products. An important part of my role as Chief Architect at Puppet is to help shape the next era of products and services that will lead our customers into the future. What do I see as critical to this next-generation evolution? Open Source. Let me tell you why.

I firmly believe that open source growth has advanced technology tremendously over the past few decades and inspired people to participate in that progress in a more open and powerful way. Puppet has used open source as a fundamental component of our business model from the beginning. Today, we value the role open source plays in how we continue to shape development with and for our customers and community members. Successful and healthy open source projects are about more than just the code. Based on our experience with open source, we know firsthand how important community is to the health of open source projects. A strong community is an engine that can drive deeper and bolder innovation.

Puppet Forge is a good example of the power of an ecosystem through open source. There are more than 44,470 individual releases on Puppet Forge, the open source marketplace for modules developed by the community. Our ecosystem has 142,000 commits on GitHub, and our four most popular modules alone have been downloaded over 60 million times each. Our users rely on Puppet to automate their infrastructure; the modules in the Forge are the building blocks of automation.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of open source value and commercial value has always been a fascinating topic for me. An open source development model presents unique challenges and opportunities that change when that model is used for commercial application development. Many companies don't ask the right questions before choosing an open source model - or they don't evolve their approach to open source as their portfolio grows. At Puppet, we are constantly asking ourselves what role open source plays in the future of the enterprise as we think about the innovations and changes we are making in our technology stack and product portfolio. It's important that we approach this work intentionally so that both the company and the community benefit.

Part of my job at Puppet is to make room for us to make thoughtful decisions that are instrumental to the continued growth of Puppet and the success of our commercial customers. However, I strongly believe that we will continue to deliver on the promises we have made to our larger open source community about collaboration. When I say collaboration, I mean everything from raising an issue, to contributing to code, to participating in training or education to help others adopt a tool. When we examine our position as a company in terms of our open source attitude, we should look at the benefits and obstacles not only from the company's perspective, but also through the eyes of the individual members of the open source community. We need to understand what they are trying to accomplish in their daily work so that we can continue to support them.