Global open source community is a powerful force that is shaping the future of technological innovations. Their presence and influence ensure that creative aspect of technology is in access to everyone and is not monopolized by multinational tech companies with the power to move the world. Open source tech products mean they can be edited, improved and personalized by tech geeks who wish to try their luck into innovating something valuable.
More tech giants are open-sourcing their once-so-secret products, even solo venturing behemoths like Microsoft are finally yielding to the potential of open source communities. Today, the entire world knows the potential of IoTs (Internet of things) which are serving as central hubs for open source experiments. So here is a roundup of some recent corporate decisions about open sourcing their tech products.
Microsoft Web GL: Since Google Chrome has abandoned AT&T based plugins to incorporate more java nativity, Web GL technology is the perfect replacement of slow and buggy web players that allows embedding 3D content in internet browsers. And Microsoft’s version is reliably hi-tech.
HP’s The Machine: It is HP’s largest and the most amazing project intended to create the next generation supercomputer class of PCs with an intelligent AI to manage and do the things that are hard to imagine today.
Also Checkout: Tilt Brush VR: A Magic in your Hand
Google TensorFlow: A software library for machine intelligence that drives complex powerful systems like Google Search, Google Cloud, and Google’s very own Project Magenta, that fully utilizes TensorFlow’s deep learning capabilities.
Amazon DSSTNE: Amazon’s machine learning horse which is somewhat a peer technology to Google’s Tensorflow.
Google Parsey McParseFace: An English parsing software, considered the best when it comes to accurate linguistic model.
IBM OpenWisk: A cloud-first distributed event-based programming service that offers programming model to upload and register responding event handlers to a cloud service.
The decision to open source is not only a gesture of goodwill by these global enterprises but a necessary evil as well. It allows independent developers to modify an already well-furnished product into a better one. Tech companies have realized the power of open source communities, and by opening their editable assets, they are exposing them to the creative virus of young programmers.
See, when it comes to innovation, the willingness to discover and create weighs more than skills and expertise. Doesn’t matter how much a company pays a professional programmer with decades of experience, he/she cannot match the combined power of hobbyist developers who are not in it just for the money, but for the taste of it as well. Global open source community is an undeniable force that will soon drive vehicles (software technologies) with unlimited horsepower, the lone rangers don’t stand a chance. And if that is true, the future of operating systems rests with Linux whether it is in the form of Android in smartphones or Chrome OS in Laptops. Yes, they are both maintained by Google, but souls of both platforms are based on Open Source Linux.
Apart from these “donated” technological tools, which are no doubt very powerful and we are thankful to the donning parties, there are other promising open source tech projects like MyCroft that started from the scratch but have turned into something massive. Open Source communities are also helping discover talented software engineers and amateur coders, and such programmers are finally getting some feedback. More importantly, it has opened the doors to entrepreneurship as groups of developers are coming together and forming more marketable alliances. Those tech startups you see KickStarter are a wonderful example.
