Adopting InnerSource

Chapter 4. Living in a BIOSphere at Robert Bosch

With Georg Grütter, Diogo Fregonese, and Jason Zink

• Year, place founded: 1886, Stuttgart, Germany

• Area(s) of business: Automotive, consumer goods, industry technology, energy and buildings

• Revenues: ca. €78.1 billion (2017)

• Offices: 440 subsidiaries in 60 countries, 125 R&D locations

• Number of employees worldwide: 402,000

• Number of software engineers: 20,000

• Year of InnerSource adoption: 2009

Robert Bosch GmbH is a large corporation active in areas ranging from mobility and industrial solutions to energy and building technology and consumer goods. Like any true startup, Bosch was founded in a garage; it all began in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1886. Since then, Bosch has grown to over 400,000 employees, called “associates,” who are distributed across 120 research and development offices spanning five continents. Due to the extremely distributed nature of the company, Bosch, like any other distributed organization, faces challenges in achieving collaboration across business units (often called “silos”), across different locations, and across different time zones. For such a large company to remain successful, it is essential to facilitate and improve collaboration. In pursuit of that goal, two associates in corporate research who were interested in free and Open Source software started playing with the idea that the Open Source development model could address many of the issues associated with distributed development. ...