Longitude Sound Bytes
Ep 76: Open Source Collaboration | Jim Whitehurst – by Berk Alp Yazici (Listen)
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
I’m a Longitude fellow, Berk Alp Yakici from Rice University, and today, I will be presenting a sound byte from Jim Whitehurst, the president of IBM. He will be speaking about open source and collaboration.
Jim Whitehurst, president, IBM:
Hi, I’m Jim Whitehurst, president of IBM. I wrote pages of a set of interrelated problems, from climate change, to shrinking environmental ecologies driven by pollution and climate, to global poverty. But I’m also optimistic that the 7 billion people we have, and that many minds working together, can solve these problems in the 21st century. But that also requires that we find ways that we can work together. And that’s where open source comes in. Open source is a way for people to come together to work together to create single solutions.
A lot of people think of open source as crowdsourcing, getting millions of people together, and each throws out an idea one of those ideas is likely to be good. But open source is deeper than that. It’s not about getting a million people to throw ideas up and hoping one’s good. It’s about millions of people working together, to fuse ideas, to take three really good ideas to make great ideas, and taking 10 great ideas to make extraordinary leaps forward. And so as we think about how we solve these problems, it can’t be any individual company or country or institution on their own. It’s going to require us all working together, and the power of the model of open source is about how we can work together, how the best ideas win, how ideas fuse together; these are going to be a part of that solution. So I’m pleased that IBM and Red Hat have been a key part of open source and will continue our leadership, and we look forward to working with institutions around the world as we look to solve these problems.
[To hear more of Jim’s views on culture and open leadership subscribe to his newsletter, “An Open Conversation with Jim”]
Berk Alp Yakici, Longitude fellow, Rice University:
Thank you Jim Whitehurst, especially for pointing out how powerful the open source model is when it comes to solving very challenging problems. Not only open source software allows people around the world to work collaboratively and fuse the individual strengths into building great solutions, it also allows everyone to freely learn from these solutions as well.
When I first got interested in programming, I spent days looking at the sample projects and source codes of existing products. Even though I had a couple of introduction to programming and x language books by my side, I never found them interesting or relevant enough to learn from them. However, reading publicly available source codes line-by-line and re-implementing them on my own computer propelled me to start building my own products.
If it wasn’t for my exposure to various open source projects, I probably wouldn’t have gained enough experience to work on projects in high school that piqued my interest in pursuing a computer science degree in college. Right now, if I were to learn a new programming language or a framework, I could just go online and look at the source code of some sample projects and follow along. Or if I wanted to learn how to write an operating system, or see what makes an operating system just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I could do so without paying any money.
To me, this is what makes open source so important. It creates an ecosystem in which new commerce can freely learn and in return contribute to the vast repository of projects.
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