“The whole idea here is by fostering an open source culture, you can actually unlock innovation. That's the joy of it, right?”
Arun Gupta, VP and General Manager, Developer Programs, Intel
Katherine Druckman: I sat down with my fellow open source enthusiasts here at Intel, Arun Gupta and Shirley Bailes. Arun recently released a book called Fostering Open Source Culture: Increase Innovation and Deliver Faster with Open Source, which was written with the help of Shirley and many others in the software ecosystem. [Note: You can read an excerpt from the book here.] We talked about the important messages in the book and about the importance of meaningfully participating in open source communities. We also discussed how it really does impact your own bottom line. Join us. There's some great stuff in here.
Arun and Shirley, thank you both for getting on a call with me. I want to let everyone know Arun and Shirley are two people with whom I’ve worked closely over the past couple of years and continue to work with pretty much daily, and it's a delight. But we're here to learn something. We're here to learn something about open source culture.
Arun, you put together a book called Fostering Open Source Culture. Tell us a little bit, not only about the book, but about the process of writing the book and the reasons behind publishing a book like this and why the message is important.
Arun Gupta’s Journey in Open Source
Arun Gupta: I'm very happy to be here now, and you said couple of years, but gosh, it feels like…
Katherine Druckman: I know, it feels like a lifetime.
Arun Gupta: ...multiple decades we have been working together.
Katherine Druckman: I know.
Arun Gupta: So, super happy to be here. I've written books before and this particular book, as I was building that open ecosystem team at Intel, I recognized that prior gigs when I was at Apple, at Amazon, at Sun, everything that I was doing, I was basically rinse and repeating that. Very similar philosophy, very similar thought process. What are the core elements? Why do we need to do open source? How do we justify it to executives, to the business, to marketing, to sales? What are the different elements that need to be done? And as I recognized more and more of that rinse and repeat methodology, I said, "There's a clear opportunity here." Because as I was talking to customers, as I was talking to partners, I was also realizing that I was answering pretty much the same question again and again. And that's basically what led me to that, "You know what? I think there's an opportunity, much bigger market of doing fun things over here." And that's frankly what led me to writing the book.
Now, most of my writing was done during '23 Christmas break. Yeah, we are '25 now, so '23 Christmas break. All it took was those two weeks I took off during that time. I structured all my thoughts in that compressed two weeks. Then I started saying that "Hey, just my story is not interesting." It's useful. But I think what makes the book much more interesting is where a lot of other companies, not just myself, not just my experience, but a lot of other teams and companies have done very similar exercises. I consciously and deliberately chose a whole bunch of companies across a very wide range of verticals that have done a similar exercise.
The book essentially is about fostering open source culture. Half the book is about my story, my experience, kind of giving that structure, thought process, framework to executives, developers, leaders across the industry. And then the other half really is about 40-plus stories from a very wide range of verticals with 55+ contributing authors who are sharing how they’re building an open source culture. How is it relevant for them? Why is it relevant for them now? Why is it relevant for them and what are they doing on a day-to-day basis to keep that open source culture relevant and sustainable?
Shirley Bailes on First-time Authorship
Katherine Druckman: Awesome. So, Shirley was one of these contributing authors. Arun, you are not a first-time author, but if I'm correct, I believe Shirley was a first-time author in this case.
Shirley Bailes: Yes. Although I still struggle a little bit with considering myself an author. This is about 1,100 words or so.
Katherine Druckman: It was published. It counts.
Shirley Bailes: Yes, it was published. But yeah, it felt a little bit daunting at first to try to even write a case study with a thousand to 1,100 words. It seemed like a high goal. The harder part was editing. I had to edit it down because it well surpassed that when I finished the piece. Culling it down to fit within that requirement was much harder.
Katherine Druckman: I have a bit of a background in publishing and people don't realize that you’ll dread filling a page and then realize, "Oh gosh, editing it down to just a page is actually the hardest part." What was your case study, Shirley?
Shirley Bailes: The role of foundations in fostering open source culture.
The Role of Foundations in Open Source
Katherine Druckman: A subject near and dear to my heart and I think all of ours. Let's talk about that. That's a great segue into the idea that fostering a great open source culture within a company also depends on working across the industry in many ways. It's not just an internal culture; it's participating in the external culture that keeps a healthy relationship with the social contract that is open source. What can you tell us about both of your experiences with open source foundations? I have my own, which I can, I suppose, add a little flavor to as well.
Shirley Bailes: Well, I think from my perspective, it's probably a little bit different than Arun's. I've not done too much work with foundations in terms of board seats and marketing committees, sort of dabbled a little bit with the eBPF Foundation work that we had done. But from an operational perspective, being able to support foundations financially as a business is important. And trying to build that justification as to why these dollars for this open source thing matters. It can be challenging when it seems to be more of a luxury spend, when budgets are tight, and why do we do the thing when it doesn't show a clear sense of ROI and driving that ROI for the business. It's constantly a feeling that we have to justify what open source software does, what open source is and means to different businesses, and how are we all leveraging open source in different parts of our day-to-day jobs and as part of the business and how does that justify the spend and what does supporting a foundation actually mean?
I think a lot of times businesses don't understand the basis for what supporting an open source foundation is and what the foundations do. And then it's creating those definitions of a foundation or an open source project or all those different arms of a part of a foundation. The Linux Foundation oversees lots of critical projects like the Linux kernel, but it also has a huge reach in terms of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which lives and nestles underneath the Linux Foundation. It's maybe understanding this overarching ecosystem of support and how the actual ecosystem can benefit from building this village around it.
Katherine Druckman: The Linux Foundation umbrella and the organizations under it are massive. And it's not just massive in terms of size. It's massive in terms of influence. The biggest companies, the most influential technology in the world coming together to collaborate, to share the burden of keeping all of our infrastructure going, among other things.
Arun, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the responsibility. You've taken on quite a few very prominent roles in some of these foundations, and that's a lot of responsibility. Tell us why it's important for you to have that seat at the table and then how you take the opportunity, the leadership positions that you have to both influence the marketplace and the community, but also become a steward of open source almost as a whole. I mean, you're in some pretty... I'll let you describe all of the leadership positions that you hold, but you are in some interesting spots that do come with a lot of burden and opportunity.
Arun's Leadership in Open Source Foundations
Arun Gupta: I don't take this as a burden at all. It's quite a joyful part of the job, frankly. I've been on with foundations for a very long time, for almost 20 years now. Gosh, way back in 2003, '04. I was very actively involved with W3C at that time when we were doing Java and .NET interoperability. Looking at SOAP, WSDL, UDDI kind of brings a nightmare feeling, but still PTSD for that. But I was involved very actively driving those standards, implementing those standards in the Java stack.
And now over the last few years, I've been very deeply involved with the Linux Foundation and I'm on the CNCF governing board. I have represented three companies on the board. I made Amazon join CNCF, then I represented Apple on the CNCF governing board, and now, of course, I'm representing Intel on the governing board. And for the last three years or so I've been the governing board chair for CNCF. Very detailed with OpenSSF, although with OpenSSF I've only represented Intel, but I'm also the governing board chair on that side of the house.
And I take that responsibility with full attention. It's super important. I’m very fortunate to work in a company like Intel because they support…For example, I remember when I was running for the OpenSSF governing board chair position, I had a discussion with my boss that, "Hey, you want me to run for this position, but what that means is my responsibilities on the foundation side are going to increase a little bit. And then I really need somebody to help me do some of the internal activities that needs to be driven. I'm very much committed to drive them, but I need somebody who can execute them on a regular basis." And that's the level of support that the company gave. My boss said, "Yeah, okay, you need somebody who can drive the strategy for you." So, we hired somebody on my team to drive the strategy. That really frees up my time to do the work on the foundation side of the house.
And what is the benefit to Intel? I mean, well, per Forbes, Intel is the most cyber secure company, and we are really looking at it all the way down to the chip level, to the wafer level, and all the way to the software. And all the initiatives that happen in OpenSSF are directly relevant to us. Ditto with Kubernetes, which is part of the CNCF Foundation. Our customers, when they use our product, whether in a hyperscaler, on a desktop, on a network, on the edge, on a client laptop, whatever it is, when they run these cloud native products, they expect that it'll be fully optimized and provide them the most streamlined experience. And that's where Intel continues to contribute to these open source projects.
And by being at the foundation, I'm able to wear those multiple hats that, okay, what are the initiatives that are happening at Intel? And frankly, do those initiatives, because that's part of Intel's legacy of doing “chop wood, carry water” work. That's how the company has been for over five decades. And frankly, just wearing this open.intel hoodie is saying that, "Yeah, I'm doing this work, but I represent Intel brand." Get the job done. Not everything has to be and can be tied to a dollar return.
The Business Case for Open Source
Katherine Druckman: Let's talk about that. Again, great segue. But at some level it does. And it is difficult I think to draw those dotted lines to a specific revenue. However, there is a tremendous return on the investment you put into open source communities, and I wondered if we could talk a little bit about that.
Arun Gupta: Totally.
Katherine Druckman: Some of the obvious ones are sharing the technical debt, right? But what else could you tell us about that ROI?
Arun Gupta: I think one of the sections in the book is…and here is the book.
Katherine Druckman: Lovely cover, even.
Arun Gupta: Yeah, thank you.
Katherine Druckman: I love that it has a lock. It's a little nod to our security culture here.
Arun Gupta: Well, the security culture, and then the whole idea here is by fostering an open source culture, you can actually unlock innovation. That's the joy of it.
One of the sections in the book talks about the philosophies of engagement in open source and corporate altruism. What does that mean really? That I'm not doing it for the charity. It needs to tie back to my business. Then it talks about the philosophy of enlightened self-interest, that companies can benefit themselves while contributing to the common good of the open source community.
It really depends on your philosophy. In open source, we always talk about... I remember listening to Linus, who's the creator of Linux operating system. He was saying, "Every commit that comes to Linux operating system, whether it's fixing a simple comma or a simple grammatical mistake in the docs, makes the kernel that much better." If you had an itch, if you scratch your own itch, that's helping others as well.
I think that's the whole element of why companies contribute to open source. One of the case studies in the book is about Bloomberg. The reason they contribute to open source is because it's part of the corporate philosophy. Philanthropy is big on it. And I was just reading an article on Michael Bloomberg, how he talked about, for example, that, "Hey, the new administration has pulled back from the Paris Climate Agreement." Bloomberg said, "We are going to fund it as a corporate entity." Philanthropy is very much at the root, and that's why they gave these dollars for employees who are contributing to open source to the nonprofit charitable organization.
I think the point is companies are doing open source in a wide variety of ways. When I was at Amazon, we were doing contributions back to open source because our customers used to tell us that, "Hey, we want to make sure Kubernetes is run in the most optimized manner." So, Amazon started contributing to Kubernetes. Eventually they launched EKS, which is what I was part of, and ran very successfully over there.
At Apple, we contributed, again, back to Kubernetes, primarily when we went to the executive management that, "Folks, you are running Kubernetes in a very unique way. I've not seen anybody else running Kubernetes in that way. But if you want to solve your own challenges, that means you’ve got to step up. You can't be at the sideline saying, 'Hey, shoot that three-pointer.' Nobody would shoot that for you. You’ve got to get it into the code, get it into the three-pointer line and say, 'Yeah, I'm going to place myself and shoot and get the point over there.'"
There is no one right answer. As they say, “NORA,” right? No One Right Answer. It really depends on how you tie it to the business case. What is the relevance? Kubernetes is built by what? 80,000 developers at 5,000 companies. A single company cannot invest that much and be able to monetize it. If you just scratch your own itch, if you do your enlightened self-interest, or corporate altruism, whatever you may say, I think it really needs to connect back with your business dollars or corporate philosophy, and that's why you contribute. The whole idea is to raise the awareness of it so that the executives understand, and that constant education needs to happen.
Katherine Druckman: Shirley, I'm sure you have some thoughts. And we've all worked for and with companies of all sizes, businesses whose core business model in many cases depends on open source software. Building on this question about ROI and the business justification for open source culture, what would you advise people? Because again, you have a little bit more of a marketing mindset. And when you're trying to build a business, especially, for example, a startup that might be around an open source piece of software, how would you advise people to embrace open source culture and why would you tell them it's so important?
Shirley Bailes: It's a multifold answer. I mean, other than the usual sustainability and stability, the financial support of a foundation or a project helps maintain and manage these projects over time. And as everyone has noted, you don't want to become reliant on a single company, or an individual. So, we're sort of safeguarding this longer-term availability of the source code.
There are all those aspects of community-driven development as well, fostering this diverse community of contributors because you don't want it to be one-sided. Contributing to foundations allows for wider participation and tends to lead to better quality code, bug fixes, and new features. I find that a lot of times financial support, when we are donating or sponsoring it as a company, enables these foundations to fund project development, fund the maintainers, pay people for the work that they're actually doing and contributing, and it supports community events, and a number of these community events also create financial viability for these things to continue. It's sort of this circle of continuity and supporting the ecosystem in that way.
A lot of times when we think about foundations, we tend to talk about the bigger foundations in the ecosystem like the Linux Foundation and the CNCF. But there's a lot of other organizations that are a little bit smaller but do as much work and are especially viable in their specific areas, like the Apache Software Foundation, which has been around for quite some time. But there's also the Software Freedom Conservancy, and they support the projects such as Outreachy that give legal support project management tools and allow for collaborative platform tools. But Outreachy specifically helps provide internships for those in open source and open science where folks are dealing with systemic bias and are impacted by underrepresentation.
A lot of these things really matter when we think about how and where you want to invest your dollars and why it matters to what you're building as a business.
The Importance of Community and Collaboration
Katherine Druckman: That's fantastic. You can't overstate the importance of these things. I love that you brought up Outreachy, for example. For people who are not super familiar with open source communities, I think there can be a question of, “why do you invest this effort here and this money here?” But something like Outreachy, or encouraging new contributors, we're not doing it necessarily out of the goodness of our heart. I mean, that might be part of it for sure, but we need to ensure that there is a pipeline of new talent coming into open source projects and that talent can come from anywhere. We rely on these things in our day-to-day lives…everybody…if you are using any kind of technology in your life, you depend on open source software. You depend on those projects being successful, especially something as important as Kubernetes or Linux. We really do need to ensure that the next generation is enabled to keep it all going.
Arun Gupta: What you're highlighting is a genuine problem, which was discussed in the last open source summit, particularly when Linus was talking about it. I mean, if you look at Linux kernel, that's been around for 30 years and most of the maintainers have stuck around all this while. Now that group is aging, you know?
Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Aren't we all.
Arun Gupta: And they need that influx of new developers. And it's not like, "Hey, today I'm not a maintainer and tomorrow I'm a maintainer." It takes a good three to four to five years, maybe longer in some cases, maybe shorter in some cases to be a maintainer. And how do we get the developers excited? Because there's developers who are coming up, they all want to work on GenAI without realizing that, "Oh, you know what? Linux is the base of all of that." So how do you get the developers excited to build that new pipeline?
And, to Shirley's point, it's not just the code that is part of it. Code is king for sure. Code is the ultimate part of it. But by supporting these foundations, by sponsoring the events, by hyperscalers running these managed services, these are all the elements that make open source that much more sustainable.
Katherine Druckman: We love to throw these statistics around about how ubiquitous open source software is, but it really is. We can't live without this stuff. We really can't anymore. It is critical, critical infrastructure.
Is there anything else that either of you wanted to get across about why fostering a healthy open source culture is so important?
Conclusion and Book Information
Arun Gupta: Yeah. I think to me, frankly, back in 2011, Marc Andreessen said, "Software is eating the world." Then in 2022, Jim Zemlin said, "Most of that software is open source." And given that baseline, if you're not contributing to open source, you're not going to make it sustainable. And then everything kind of falls apart in that sense. So that's frankly the reason that you want to foster an open source culture.
In order to contribute to open source, you could either hire people from outside or you could grow people from inside the company so that they are more effective contributors and maintainers. And that's the key element that executives... Just the way you have a CIO, CISO, CTO, all these people fundamentally need to understand where open source is used in the company, how it is used, and how they are making it sustainable. How are they making it secure? How is the patching vulnerability, etcetera, all being done in open source? And that's the reason they need to invest in the open source culture.
And what I'm looking at again is the book, essentially. In the book, there are case studies by Amazon, BlackRock, Bloomberg, Canonical, Docker, Sun—which is where I spent a lot of time—GitHub, Infosys, Fidelity Investments, UC Santa Cruz, Johns Hopkins, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota. So a whole lot of interesting case studies across a wide range of verticals where these companies have done a great job.
It’s not just tech companies. If you exist as a company, you are most likely using a large part of open source. This book is really targeting a very large, wide audience, primarily top tier executives who want to understand how to bring about cultural change but also managers, people at the ground level who are doing the real work.
The last part of the book is about framework. It gives you a 10-step framework that, "Okay, I'm bought into it. I'm ready to go for it. How do I implement it? How do I execute it?" That's the part of the book where you can just take it and run with it.
Shirley Bailes: I think too, that there's corporate sort of culture with supporting such things, but I also think that sometimes it really does boil down to the people factor. Pat Gelsinger, Intel's most recent CEO, noted that innovation thrives most when people can come together and collaborate in this sort of transparent environment. And when we think of foundations and open source, it's a community. It's a community of people, of thought, of work, of shared beliefs.
Also, lately with the definition of open source AI, we also don't come together and agree on things. And this is just communities in general or at large. A lot of folks invest a lot of time, their own time volunteering. It feels almost like a civic or community duty to help bridge the gaps, to help educate the next generation, to help educate each other.
For example, when we look at events like FOSDEM, which is coming up quickly, all of that is volunteer-run, all of those people, all that content, all those dev rooms, everyone showing up is. There is obviously a lot of corporate support in people's travel and whatnot, but for the basis of the community to keep these conversations going that are key and vital to the next big thing, the next best thing or bug fix or solving some problem that we haven't even discovered is a problem yet. But it really boils down to just people and community and collaboration.
Katherine Druckman: I love it. Well, thank you both so much. This has been wonderful. Where can we buy your book? Amazon. I know Amazon has it.
Arun Gupta: Amazon is where it's available. That's the primary place where you can buy it. I would love for you to drop a review on LinkedIn or star the book on Amazon, anything you can do. If you're interested in connecting with a particular author or a contributing author like Shirley, there are 55 others that are contributing authors of the book. If you want to connect with any one of those, I would be happy to do that too.
It's been a fantastic experience writing this book. I thought I knew a little bit about open source culture over the last 20 years, and, my gosh, such a humbling experience when you read these stories across the enterprise, and why companies are building that open source culture, and how they are tying it back to their business.
Katherine Druckman: Fantastic. Well, let's hope that continues and only snowballs from here.
Arun Gupta: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for having us here.
Katherine Druckman: You've been listening to Open at Intel. Be sure to check out more about Intel’s work in the open source community at Open.Intel, on X, or on LinkedIn. We hope you join us again next time to geek out about open source.
About the Guests
Arun Gupta, VP and General Manager, Developer Programs, Intel
Arun Gupta is vice president and general manager of Developer Programs at Intel Corporation. He is an open source strategist, advocate, and practitioner for over two decades. He has taken companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems through systemic changes to embrace open source principles. He is the elected chair of the CNCF GB and elected Chair of the OpenSSF GB. He has delivered technical talks in 45+ countries and authored multiple books. He is a fitness and kindness enthusiast. Find him on LinkedIn.
Shirley Bailes, Director of Software Ecosystem Strategy, Intel
Shirley Bailes has been involved in developer communities and building open source programs for over 15 years. She is the director of Software Ecosystem Strategy in Intel’s Office of the CTO, where she leads thought leadership and strategic initiatives to accelerate startup innovation and developer ecosystem growth. She previously led open source programs at AWS and served as co-president of the Women at Amazon Global Board. Find her on LinkedIn.
About the Host
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Security Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source security evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she's a long-time champion of open source and open standards. She is a software engineer and content creator with over a decade of experience in engineering, content strategy, product management, user experience, and technology evangelism. Find her on LinkedIn.