Tim O ‘Reilly first proposed the concept of InnerSource, or internal open source, in 2000. Although this concept has been put forward for 20 years, it is still relatively unknown in China. Most of us are probably more familiar with Open Source, a publishing model that makes the Source code of software available to the public and has led to many excellent software and developers. Insider is the introduction of the open source model into a company or organization, allowing developers to develop proprietary software while implementing open source internally.
Why do we push endogenous
Increase code reuse and improve product quality
Increasing the reuse of components and code can also be said to reduce the duplication of components and code development. As we all know, reinventing the wheel is one of the most pointless things to do, and the source can effectively eliminate this hassle.
In layman’s terms, team A needs A new feature during development that team B has done before, so team A can use team B’s code directly from the source repository, or even return A better version to team B, as Linus’s rule states: With enough eyeballs, all bugs can emerge.
But without this source repository, team A would have had to redevelop this functionality. Not only is time and cost wasted, but there’s even more important — business opportunities.
Accelerate knowledge sharing and enhance developer capabilities
If developers are in a relatively isolated environment and testers are limited to their own small teams, they are of course limited in terms of resources for Bug response and problem resolution. How many problems could the team have found and solved if they had more outside members with different experiences and perspectives? How will this affect the quality of the product? The answer, of course, is obvious.
As a manager, the developers you work with are great people you recognize, but they may only work with three or five or ten people and learn from each other. If they can work with twenty or thirty or more great developers, they can learn from each other and improve their abilities while sharing knowledge, and that will naturally lead to quality improvements.
Innovation through openness
Developers are often extremely smart, and with dozens or even hundreds of extremely smart developers working together, the sparks of these frictions can lead to more unexpected surprises, a cool new feature or even a brand new product. But if invisible walls are built between them, this capacity for innovation will undoubtedly be compromised.
Internal development status
Many foreign big companies have also begun to carry out their own internal source practices, such as Google has only one code repository, shared by tens of thousands of developers from dozens of offices around the world, Microsoft also announced in 2019 to fully embrace internal source. Even more influential is the InnerSource Commons community, spearheaded by PayPal in 2015, which now supports and connects nearly 100 companies, academic institutions and government agencies.
In terms of domestic, although it is still a new thing, but the domestic large factories also began to actively promote the internal source. Tencent, which has more than 20,000 developers, started to open source internally from the bottom up in 2012, and now has 65 percent of its projects open source internally. Baidu’s internal push has also yielded some results, such as PaddlePaddle, an open source deep learning platform widely used within Baidu, and ODP, a PHP development framework. As for the ODP project, due to the lack of project manpower, it was unable to face many demands, so it started internal open source in 2016. A year later, more than 200 developers joined the project to make contributions, and more than 100 patches were added.
It can be said that the internal source in China has begun to take shape, and there will only be more enterprises to embrace the internal source.
How does Gitee help companies with their internal practices
Gitee Enterprise Edition provides internal and open source governance capabilities for enterprises. The following figure shows the internal management interface of Gitee Enterprise Edition:
In the source management interface, Gitee Enterprise edition divides the code repository into three categories:
1. Proprietary warehouse
The proprietary warehouse (internal warehouse, or private warehouse) is the project warehouse that the enterprise needs to strictly control the authority, and is generally the core business product of the enterprise. Such repositories are accessible only to authorized members.
2. Internal warehouse
An internal repository is an enterprise-wide open source repository that is accessible to all members of the enterprise. Members can contribute to the project by using open source software.
3. Open source repository
Enterprise open source repositories are no different from regular open source projects in that anyone can access the code in such repositories and contribute according to the regular open source project participation process.
In addition to the warehouse, there are open source Issue aggregation, open source PR aggregation, open source statistics, etc. Welcome to visit Gitee Enterprise Edition experience: gitee.com/enterprises
Of course, in order to give full play to the advantages of Gitee enterprise edition in enterprise internal practice, it is more necessary to support the internal management of the enterprise, through the construction of the system and culture to promote the development of internal sources, so that it really play out the effect. Continuous open source preaching to engineers and managers; Set policies and procedures to motivate contributors; Keep setting up benchmarking projects, benchmarking contributors, etc.
We put together an internal knowledge base: gitee.com/InnerSource… Welcome to work together to improve 🙂