What is open source culture, why is it important and how do we measure it? Open source programs support a corporate culture that prioritises DevOps and microservices architecture, and enables developers to quickly use and participate in internal and external projects. It’s no longer sufficient to measure a company’s open source culture by counting what percentage of their technology stack is open source. Businesses interested in improved developer efficiency should examine their participation in open source projects and support a culture that nurtures code sharing and collaboration on externally maintained projects. With recent decoupling and an immense amount of different frontend frameworks more need has risen to contribute beyond Drupal. Open source culture is more than just reusing free code on GitHub/GitLab to get products to market faster. It is based on the proverb: “Sharing is caring”. The culture embraces an approach to software development that emphasises internal and external collaboration, an increasing focus on core competencies instead of core infrastructure, and implementation of DevOps processes commonly associated with microservices and cloud native technologies. Collaborating on community projects is a way of thinking associated with open source development. Software engineers that use externally created open source components need to collaborate with the people responsible for project maintenance. Usually, interaction is as simple as making sure software updates are integrated into new deployments, which can be solved with a continuous deployment pipeline that checks to ensure components are current and synchronised with the latest repositories and libraries. This is a good first step to get organisations comfortable with external dependencies, but two-way communication with other project maintainers is what truly denotes the type of collaboration that is essential to maximising the benefits of open source culture. DevOps and Security Package maintaining and orchestration Security Operations CVE/OWASP Sending patches to other software Difference in culture Traditional Linux culture Hipster javascript frameworks Reaching out and community involvement Opportunities for Drupal Intensifying PHP collaboration Growing the contribution population Brainstorming towards an universal contribution model Gitlab Example Drupal.org Example Commercial example A company’s values are manifested in their policies and actions. Actually having policies about contributing to open source projects means that senior management has accepted that benefiting from open source requires more than freeloading — it is about giving back. Open source programs are instrumental to promoting a culture that makes companies more productive. Fostering “open source culture” is the primary purpose of open source programs. Measuring a program’s success is inherently difficult. Just like with corporate diversity initiatives, progress should initially be measured by the existence of policies and the implementation of DevOps processes strongly associated with open source culture. With these two outcomes, we expect companies will be able to reap the rewards of the open source mindset.