If you don’t understand the term innersource, you’re not alone. A survey conducted by the author among friends found that even people with decades of open source experience, including professional software developers and product managers, had a rough idea of it.
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Dr. Rüdiger Berlich has been working with open source since 1992 and worked on the topic of related business models in his MBA. He advises companies on open and internal source issues, agile practices, and change management.
The term was coined twenty years ago. Tim O’Reilly Written in December 2000 On the relationship between OpenGL and open source: “The mission of Colab (ColabNet was a company co-founded by O’Reilly) is to enable open source-style collaborative development for the software industry as a whole. This typically involves large companies transitioning to “But we’ve also worked with companies on what we call ‘inner sourcing’ – that is, helping them use open source technologies within the company.” This can be explained by the fact that this concept plays a greater role in larger companies and proprietary software development.
The spelling of innersource without spaces came from an effort to improve the concept’s lack of visibility. in the book “adopting innersourceThe explanation by Danis Cooper and Claas-Jan Stoll is: “To make the term easier to find (if you try to search for ‘Internal Source’ you will only get results that are not software related), we have The space in has been removed and CamelCase notation introduced.” Today this is not a problem – both Google and ChatGPT also provide answers suitable for “inside sources”.
Transferring open source concepts into the company
InnerSource solves a fundamental problem in many companies that knowledge and resources are fragmented. In mature organizational structures, teams often work in isolation, leading to duplicate 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 only fit half. This creates parallel worlds that become more difficult to integrate as their complexity increases.
The innersource philosophy offers an alternative: it applies the open source principle “Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers”, introduced by Eric Raymond in 1997. Essay “The cathedral and the marketplace” are described. Applied to companies, this means making the code available and promoting it within the company as soon as it’s built. Contributors should come not only from your own peer group, but ideally across departmental boundaries – but also limited to your own organisation. This helps limit the number of newly created silos in the initial phase and can also be used in established projects with more effort.
If this internal community building is successful, it not only avoids different solutions, but the company also benefits from the second principle coined by Eric Raymond: “Given enough attention, all bugs are shallow”. , also known as Linus’s law. The quality increases as well as the development is based on the actual needs of the users, further increasing the efficiency.
FOSS Manifesto Mercedes-Benz AG describes some principles, including
- Developers should seek out suitable open or internal source alternatives before developing or purchasing code themselves.
- Developers must join the InnerSource community and contribute to projects.
InnerSource is not only in practice at Mercedes. Consulting firm Gartner ranked this topic 7th in its 2023 ranking Software Engineering Hype Cycle.
InnerSource Commons as a central point of contact
Open source pioneer Dennys Cooper started the cross-company and well-organized InnerSource Commons initiative in 2015 with the goal of collecting and disseminating knowledge about InnerSource. This initiative creates a central hub, publishes comprehensive information on the platform and provides innersource pattern First. They provide information for the establishment and further operation of InnerSource communities. Interested parties can also find free books, case studies, and open source comparisons on the platform. The initiative also organizes events, such as the recent one, online innersource summit From November 20 to November 21, 2024. Which can be accessed for free through YouTube Lecture streams Also a good source of information.
Which is published by Pahal State of the InnerSource Report 2024 InnerSource provides a quantitative overview of the initiative’s objectives and implementation.
A lot of information can be found in this also Publishing from SAPWho actively raised this topic. Project Portal from SAP on GitHub Served as a template for one of the ones mentioned Patterns of the Commonsin its essence Lecture “SAP’s Repository Linter” At Summit 2024, Benjamin Ihrig, Cloud Native Developer at SAP, described his employer’s commitment as: “An essential part of our software development process: fostering collaboration, innovation, and efficient code reuse.”
