PayPal has hired its first head of open source software: Danese Cooper, a veteran of such tech giants as Apple, Sun Microsystems, and Intel.

In her new role, Cooper will assess the ways that PayPal is using open source software, and seek to improve collaboration on projects both inside and outside the company. Many large web operations, including Google and Facebook and even Microsoft, have people in similar roles. But Cooper is a particularly welcome addition to the role because shes a woman. Women are still underrepresented in top tech posts.

Open source software is computer code thats freely available for anyone to use as they see fit software that has been released to the public by individual developers, nonprofit organizations, and even large corporations. That may seem like a bad business move, but if you open source your code, anyone can improve upon it, and this has led many companies to pool their resources around mutually beneficial projects, such the Linux operating system or the Apache web server.

Although open source is often invisible to the end user, many of the computing devices and online services that we use every day including Android phones, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are built on open source foundations. PayPal is no exception. The company has long used open source tools such as the Hadoop data-crunching software and the OpenStack cloud computing platform, and its now looking to hone its open source efforts through Danese Cooper.

Cooper has seen the benefits of open source collaboration first hand and has learned the hard way what happens when developers dont share code when they should. At Apple, she managed a team that developed a video chat program based on Apples QuickTime video format, and the code behind Quicktime wasnt even shared with everyone inside the company. There were some people in my group that helped write Quicktime, but because of an internal licensing struggle at the time, the QuickTime team shut them out of their own code tree, she says. It was really inefficient, and it really pissed me off.

She eventually left Apple for Symantec. But although Symantec offered a more collaborative company culture, its software wasnt open source. Her open source career began two years later in a Sushi restaurant in Cupertino, California, near Apple headquarters. Cooper was raving about Symantecs collaborative ethos when a stranger walked up, tapped her on the shoulder, and asked if shed like to help open source the Java programming language. It turned out he was a recruiter for Sun Microsystems, the maker of Java, and after overhearing Coopers conversation, he had the feeling shed be a good fit at the company.

Cooper eventually became Suns chief open source evangelist. At the company, she saw the benefits of open source, such as the time a developer from outside Sun submitted an update to Java that saw the language run about 16 times faster. But she also the company stray from open source in ways that undermined its mission.

After stints at Intel, Revolution Analytics, and the Wikimedia Foundation, she started her own open source consulting business, and thats how she got in touch with PayPal. In addition to using open source tools like Hadoop, PayPal has released its own open source projects, such as the software development framework Kraken. And as its open source contributions grew, the company needed someone to help build a strategy for managing all its projects.

After some discussion, Cooper agreed to give up the consultants life and join PayPal full-time. She cites the opportunity to work on longer term projects and a team that includes Kirsten Wolberg another leading woman in tech as big reasons for joining the company. But most importantly, she thinks PayPals developers have their hearts in the right place. In other words, theyre likely to share their code and unlikely to piss her off.

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Apple Veteran Named PayPal's First Head of Open Source Software

By Jack M. Germain LinuxInsider 02/19/14 9:47 PM PT

The biggest driving factor for software developers to work together with open source is cost. It is much cheaper for them to cooperate through open source than it is to remain isolated with proprietary software, asserted Inktank VP of Product Management Neil Levine. "You can no longer rely on one particular vendor to provide everything you need with regard to technology."

The open source business model has an inherent ability to bring software rivals together for mutual gain. This approach to developing and distributing software keeps expanding the usefulness and success of the Linux operating system as well.

Linux has not yet come close to replacing Windows on the desktop, but open source is much more than Linux. Its "co-opetive" nature is spreading through the enterprise as much as it is driving the many different Linux development communities.

The continued growth of open source software is closely linked with the ongoing struggle to bring about an expansion of the Linux footprint. Certainly one unifying factor in bringing together the various competing entities is the leadership provided by the Linux Foundation and other umbrella organizations.

The co-opetive nature of open source is driven further by consortiums that gather cooperation of industry makers and shakers toward a common computing goal. Consider the Allseen Alliance's efforts in growing the Internet of Things. Another example is the Open Compute Project. It formed to drive development of servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects.

Numerous similar organizations have sprung up in recent years to foster the advantages and progress of open source software. Often unspoken in this support is the growth of the Linux OS. There remains an unbreakable link between Linux and open source. This is the case not only in adopting the business model, but also in using open source code. Even chief Linux hater Microsoft has shown a renewed interest in contributing to the development of the Linux kernel and other open source projects.

"It is simply not possible to create technology in isolation any more. The software is too complex. The Linux kernel alone changes nine times an hour. No single organization can compete with that rate of change and pace of innovation," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider.

Onlookers often see only a series of forays that developer communities make into an opposing product maker's domain. Some divergent communities seem to thrive, while others are left behind to struggle. It is sometimes challenging to see mutual gain result from consorting with competitors.

"Obviously, as open source becomes the dominant form of technology development, there will be lots of communities. As I have said many times before, a diversity of communities is a strength rather than a weakness. The bottom line here is that code talks, and we suspect that, as always, the best code will determine which communities thrive versus contract," noted Zemlin.

Continue reading here:
Raising Linux to Grow Open Source

Facebook looks and feels like a single application, like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. But behind the scenes, in the companys data centers, youll find that the worlds most popular social network is really a multitude of different applications working in concert.

Facebook engineers build these applications using a wide range of programming languages, picking a language that matches the requirements of each project. That helps them fashion more efficient software, but it creates new challenges when it comes time to meld all these tools together, to ensure they can all communicate. To solve this issue, Facebook built a tool called Thrift, a means of managing communications between all its various applications.

The social networking giant released Thrift as an open source project back in 2007, and its now used by several other web outfits, ranging from Twitter to Evernote to Last.fm. Its a prime example of how open source software has helped bootstrap an entire generation of web services. Most of the leading web companies now share important parts of their underlying infrastructure in any effort to improve the way they work and speed the development of the web as a whole.

Most of the leading web companies now share important parts of their underlying infrastructure in any effort to improve the way they work and speed the development of the web as a whole.

But since 2007 Facebook has moved on from the original version of Thrift, creating a new version of Thrift better suited to its current needs. Today, Facebook released that new version as an open source project called fbthrift.

By open sourcing the software, Facebook is once again allowing other to fashion new services using its secret sauce. Over the years, the company has open sourced myriad projects, ranging from its data center designs to the tools it uses to handle security on Android. But fbthrift is a little different in that it could help Facebook open source a wide range of other tools that are still locked inside the company, says Facebook engineering manager Blake Matheny.

For example, the companys Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which translates code written in the PHP programming language into machine code requires fbthrift to work correctly. In order to open source HHVM, the team had to create a slightly different version that didnt need fbthrift. That means the company is maintaining two separate versions of the software, an open source version and an internal version. Now that fbthrift is open source, the team will be able to maintain just one version. Matheny says there are other projects at Facebook that havent been open sourced at all yet because of this limitation.

But why create a whole new version of Thrift, instead of simply improving the existing open source project? Matheny says that once Facebook committed Thrift to the Apache Foundation an independent organization that manages open source software the company no longer had sole control over the software. That meant that it took longer to approve new changes. The implementation we originally shipped didnt meet our needs, he says We needed a way to iterate quickly and find the right way to solve these problems.

And since Thrift had become so popular, it wasnt clear that all the changes that Facebook wanted to make would actually work for other users. fbthrift is optimized for a high throughput environment that might not be appropriate for everyone who us using apache thrift, he explains. Still, Matheny says he does hope that many of the changes Facebook made to fbthrift will find their way into the original version eventually: We still have a few people at Facebook who are part of the Apache thrift team.

The newly open sourced tool may or may not have an effect on the larger world. But the point is that it at least has a chance to.

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Facebook Boosts Its Open Source Mojo With New Project