Have you ever asked yourself how can you leverage open source for selling your products or services, attracting talent and innovating? In the first part of this lecture I’ll give a historical context about how open source has transformed the Software industry and changed the way we develop, collaborate, communicate, organize and think about business values. In the second part I will talk about open source opportunities, challenges and what it means to successfully plan and implement an open source project from the practical side. I will also share my own Open Source management experience at Intuit.

1. Open Source Movement
and Much More
Michael Kalika
Chief Architect, Intuit Israel
October 28, 2020

2. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 2
Trying to attract a new talent? Or find a new channel for selling your
products or services?

3. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 3
About me
- Chief Architect of Intuit Israel
- Innovation Catalyst at Intuit
- Vice President of IASA Israel
- Background in development, operations, and
management
- Astronomer and astrophotographer
- Father of three
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkalika
Michael Kalika
Rishon LeZion, Israel

4. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 4
What is open source?
Why open source?
What does it take?
How is it done at Intuit?
Agenda

6. Founded by
Scott Cook &
Tom Proulx
1983
Went public
on Nasdaq
1993
20 locations,
9 countries
Locations
9,000+50M ~$6.8B FY19
Revenue
Customers
worldwide
Employees
worldwide
Who we are

7. 2004 - 2019
Most Admired:
Computer Software
2002 - 2019
100 Best Companies
to Work For
2019
Most Innovative
Companies
2019
Companies Best
Positioned For Breakout
Growth
Recognized as one of the world’s leading companies
2017 - 2019
Best High Tech
Companies to work for

8. What is open source?

9. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 9
1940
Approx.
invention of
modern
computer
1974
Invention of
First PC
1983
GNU started
1991
Linux
project
started
1998
Open
Source
Initiative
(OSI) started
2005
Git project
started
Hardware Software Open Source

10. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 10
Open Source
Freedom Principles
aka “4 Freedoms”
02
0304
01
The freedom
to run the
software for
any purpose
The freedom
to study the
software
and alter its
behaviour
The freedom
to make and
distribute
copies of the
software
The freedom
to release
your modified
versions of
the software
to the public

11. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 11
● Freely accessed and used
● Freely altered and redistributed
● No discrimination against persons, groups,
fields and endeavours
● Technology Neutral
● No vendor lock-in
More details:
https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

12. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 12
People behind Open Source Movement
Richard
Stallman
Linus
Torvalds
Brian
Behlendorf

13. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 13
Who creates Open Source software?

14. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 14
Open Source ≠ Free

15. Why open source?

16. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 16
Closed Software is built like
cathedrals, carefully crafted by
individual wizards or small bands of
mages working in splendid isolation.
— Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, 1997
Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 16

17. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 17
Open Software seems to resemble a
great babbling bazaar of differing
agendas and approaches.
— Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, 1997
Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 17

18. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 18
This accelerates innovation across
the industry and facilitates
adoption of services and
products you offer.
When an open source project
becomes popular, you benefit
from a massive influx of outside
contributors, so the project and
the ecosystem evolve more
rapidly.

19. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 19
Cooperating is not a zero sum game
and by working together all
participants may yield higher returns
than the investment they make
— John Nash’s, Cooperative Games Theory
Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 19

20. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 20
Engineering Playground
Some engineers have playgrounds. Playgrounds are the perfect place to try out new concepts and patterns and when
a project is open source, it’s easy to get feedback from other highly skilled professionals.
Attract the Best, Personal Development and Morale Building
Open-source contribution during office hours is a perk that can help a lot when hiring.
Internal Collaboration
Increases collaboration between business units, remote sites and teams
fffffff
More benefits

21. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 21
Speed, Flexibility and Lower Costs are Top Open Source Benefits
Source: TODO, Talk Openly Develop Openly, Annual Survey: https://github.com/todogroup/survey
TODO = Talk Openly, Develop Openly, https://todogroup.org/

22. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 22
What to Open Source?
● Eat your own dog food and build for an end-user case - the product
is used internally in production at scale
● The product solves a specific problem in a unique way
● The product is modularised and can be used easily
● Does NOT represent core business
● No platform or vendor lock-in

23. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 23
The number one reason to NOT open source a project is that it includes, or
links to your company’s “secret sauce” or sensitive data because doing so
can create security issues or erode competitive advantage.
Why not Open Source?

24. What does it take?

25. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 25
Open Source is NOT just
sharing code at Github

26. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 26
Strategy
What are our goals? What do we want to achieve?
Engineering Time Investment and Commitment
Feature Development, Issues, Pull Requests Reviews, Forums, Meetups, Blogging
Education & Mentorship
Education and Mentor about open source practices, clean code, community building, etc.
Compliance
Legal aspects, reviews and licensing
Marketing & Communication
How to get smartest professionals contributing to open source projects? Partnership building. Communication
with external partners and communities.
Open Source Program Management
Coordination and management of the above
Open Sourcing Requires an Investment in...

27. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 27
How to Measure?
Area Measurements
Project adoption • # Dependent internal products
• # Visitors to GitHub repo
• # Followers on GitHub
• # Downloads
• # Forks
• # Stars in GitHub
• # Mentions in social media
• # Meetups, hackathons
• # Contributing companies
• # Dependent external products (need to track media & community for
that)
Activity • # Pull requests submitted, opened, accepted and rejected
• # Issues submitted
Contribution • Internal vs External contributors ratio
• Ratio of commits per contributor - external vs. internal
Productivity and Efficiency • Length of time pull requests remain open
• Length of time issues remain open
Investment • Time engineers spend on actual development of the project
• Time spent on project promotion activities - engineers vs. non-engineers
• Budget spent on project promotion, consultancy etc.

28. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 28
More guides
https://todogroup.org/guides/

29. How is it done at Intuit?

30. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 30
There are 3 main reasons why it’s important to be an active
player in the open source community: 1) it allows us to adopt
advanced technologies that are robust, free and not tied to a
vendor; furthermore, many critical new innovations are
available first in open source; 2) it increases our tech profile,
both internally and externally, and helps us with hiring; and 3) it
helps our code stay fresh because there’s a whole community
keeping it relevant and evolving it.
— Marianna Tessel, Marianna's Thoughts - December 2019
Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 30

31. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 31
https://opensource.intuit.com/
Open Source

32. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 32
Argo - Get stuff done with Kubernetes!
The Argo Project is a set of Kubernetes-native tools for deploying
and running jobs and applications.
It uses GitOps paradigms such as continuous delivery, progressive
delivery and enables MLOps on Kubernetes.
● Argo Workflows - Container-native Workflow Engine
● Argo CD - Declarative GitOps Continuous Delivery
● Argo Rollouts - Declarative Progressive Delivery and
Experimentation
● Argo Events - Event-based Dependency Manager
● https://github.com/argoproj
● 10,950+ GitHub stars
● 3,600+ Slack members
● 460+ contributors
● 4,600+ commits
● 170+ end user companies
● 250+ releases
● 60% contributions by non Intuit
● Part of CNCF incubator

33. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 33
Inner Source
● Inner Source takes the lessons learned from
developing Open Source software and
applies them to the way companies develop
software internally.
● Inner Source is a priority at Intuit and a vital
part of the vision for Intuit's Engineering
Culture.
More on this:
● http://innersourcecommons.org/
● https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns

34. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 34
Gender Diversity in Open Source
● It’s a painful truth in the open source community that
diversity in our ranks is worse than diversity in tech
overall.
● According to TopTal’s study in Github
○ 6% of the randomly sampled profiles
○ 5.4% of profiles with over 10 contributions
● At Intuit, not only do we have women contributing to
open source, we also have a number of women creating
and maintaining amazing open source projects
Belong to
Women
Source: https://medium.com/intuit-engineering/celebrating-intuits-women-open-source-maintainers-784a2ab60801

35. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 35
Principles & Guidelines
● The project has proved useful internally by at least another team (consider number of
internal stars, contributions and adopters using it in production).
● The project solves a specific problem in a unique, new way.
● Your team will support the project for the foreseeable future, including by answering
community questions and reviewing PRs in a timely manner.
● The project successfully completes four required reviews:
1. Technical Review
2. Business Review
3. Legal Review
4. Security Review

36. Intuit Confidential and Proprietary 36
Key Takeaways
Open Source allows adopt new, robust & free technologies
Open Source increases your company tech profile
Open Source helps your code stay fresh
Eat your own dog food and build for an end-user case
Open Source is NOT just sharing code at Github
Measure your Open Source initiatives
Consider both - Open and Inner Source in your company
1
6
2
5
4
3
7

37. Thanks for joining!
Questions?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkalika
Chief Architect, Intuit Israel
Innovation Catalyst