Open source software has become a default and a class of emerging startups are adopting it as their foundation, according to Facebook and venture capital execs at Facebook’s At Scale event here.
The annual geek fest aims to encourage software developers to contribute to and collaborate on open source code. Walking the talk, Facebook described code it plans to release for everything from stabilizing 360-degree videos to improving data compression and machine learning. However, the event also showed Facebook’s openness has its limits.
“There is so much happening in the open and we can solve problems faster working together,” said Jay Parikh, head of engineering and infrastructure at Facebook in a keynote talk, noting an estimated 1.5 million engineers follow open source projects.
The open strategy Facebook has adopted in both code and hardware is being embraced by a class of new startups, said venture capitalist Ping Li, a general partner at Accel Partners which backs Spotify and Slack. Open software has “become the de facto standard, even in the U.S. government you start with open software and add only what’s missing,” he said.
Companies building products based on open code, many with “proprietary software wrapped around it to make enterprise ready” will make up some of the largest tech public offerings in the next few years, Li said, claiming more than 75% of business users are adopting open source code.
“Open source is a development and licensing model with many flavors, but open adoption software is a broader business model shift in how code is developed, used and monetized, like Salesforce pioneered a new way of delivering software — this is the same thing,” he said. “There’s no way a 12-person R&D shop is going to out innovate this room, so customers are turning toward the networking effect,” he added, pointing to the audience of several hundred developers.
Previously software companies would start with ideas for new features they would code into a package or cloud service. Today’s software startups are stitching together existing open source stacks in collaborations and adding features to them afterwards, he said.
“When you open code up, you can solve a lot of problems you couldn’t have imagined so I’d encourage you to think big and keep opening your code up,” Li said.
Industrial giant GE is feeling the shift to open source software as it expands into big data analytics to manage its jet engines, light bulbs and turbines as digital assets. “We are trying to bring the industrial world into the digital space,” said Himagiri Mukkamala, head of engineering for Predix software at GE Digital in a separate keynote.
The effort requires creating a digital twin of the physical product and running machine-learning analytics that can predict failures based on data of how the system is used. “A jet engine will distresses differently if it’s operating in the U.S. or the Middle East,” said the former Sybase database developer.
He called for data scientists to start reusing algorithms rather than developing them from scratch. Meanwhile, “next-generation query languages are needed to make it as easy to request a complex analysis as it is write code today,” he said.
While much analysis will be processed in data centers for groups of products, decisions about specific systems need to be made “in real time at an edge controller,” he said. In addition he called for work on an industrial protocol to support devices not appropriate for using HTTP.
[Source:-EE Times]
