Adopting InnerSource

Foreword

Tim O’Reilly

I’m told that I coined the term “InnerSource” in 2000, and sure enough there’s a blog post to prove it. I don’t remember writing it. What I do remember is an earlier conversation, in the summer or fall of 1998, not long after the so-called Open Source Summit in April of that year, to talk to an IBM team that was thinking of embracing this new movement.

They were cautious. How might it affect IBM’s business? How would they continue to own, control, and profit from their software? What kind of license might they use to get the benefit of user contribution but still manage and control their creations? The GNU Public License seemed hostile to business; the Berkeley Unix and MIT X Window System licenses were permissive but perhaps gave too much freedom. The just-released Mozilla Public License tried to find a new balance between the needs of a corporate owner and a community of developers. Should they use that or develop their own license?

I was never a big fan of the idea that licenses defined what was most important about free and Open Source software. I’d begun my career in computing in the heady days of the Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix, BSD 4.1, and AT&T’s Version 7. I had seen how Unix, based on the original architecture developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs, could attract a wide range of outside contributions from university computer science researchers despite being owned by AT&T. Many of the features that made the system most ...