2015 has passed, and looking back, it was a spectacular year — it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it the Year of Open Source. Enterprise users embraced open source at an unprecedented pace. Not only that, but longtime rivals like Cloud Foundry and OpenStack also collaborated and shared technology. At the same time, we saw traditional proprietary commercial companies like Microsoft and Apple open source parts of their products and software. 2015 was an exhilarating year.
Let’s look back at the 9 major open source events of 2015!
1. Apple Announces Swift Open Source
The biggest story of the year goes to Apple for announcing the open-sourcing of the new programming language Swift. In the process, Apple’s PR team declared that the world’s largest computer company had made open source a key part of its strategy, and after pushback from the open source community, Apple adjusted its wording. Still, this was exciting news, because Swift is a great programming language, and open-sourcing it allows users to freely use it.
2. Microsoft Embraces Open Source
With changes in leadership and new market dynamics, Microsoft began embracing open source. Surprisingly, the company open-sourced some of its core technologies, including .NET and Visual Studio, in order to capture developers’ attention. Both projects were released under the MIT open source license, and the company also developed a Linux-based operating system for a network switch on its Azure cloud.
3. Fujitsu Open Sources Its Own Products
Fujitsu has been using Linux for decades and has also contributed to many other open source projects. But when it came to its own software, it had always remained closed. This year, the company open-sourced its Open Service Catalog Manager cloud management software. I hope the company will open source more components in the future.
4. WordPress Open Sources wordpress.com
Automattic, the company behind WordPress and wordpress.com, recently rewrote the wordpress.com codebase and announced it as a new open source project named Calypso. This is the first time wordpress.com has been made available to the public under an open source license.
5. AMD Announces Open Source GPU Resources
AMD and Nvidia are two GPU giants. These companies support many open source projects, but when it comes to their own software, they have kept it closed. However, that is now changing.
This year, AMD announced the GPUOpen initiative, which will release a suite of open source effects, tools, libraries, and SDKs on GitHub under the MIT open source license. This initiative allows developers to better utilize AMD’s GPU resources and is seen as an open source alternative to Nvidia’s GameWorks.
6. Google Opens Up AI Resources
Google is no stranger to open source — it has long been famous for open-sourcing its Linux-based Android and Chrome OS. It has also open-sourced many other pieces of software.
This year, Google open-sourced its artificial intelligence (AI) engine TensorFlow. The company stated, “The system was originally developed by researchers and engineers from the Google Brain team within Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization for machine learning and deep neural networks, but the system is general-purpose and can now be applied to a wide range of other fields.”
7. Elon Musk Creates OpenAI
Elon Musk is one of the brightest minds from PayPal Mafia and a co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX. He is not very optimistic about artificial intelligence and fears it could be catastrophic for humanity. Together with many other industry leaders, he created a nonprofit organization dedicated to AI called OpenAI. According to its Wikipedia page, the organization is dedicated to AI with the purpose of “benefiting, not harming, humanity as a whole,” and they will make all their patents freely available to encourage researchers to openly share their findings.
8. GCHQ Releases Open Source Software
The UK intelligence and security agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is famous for its surveillance programs, and was dealt with following the Edward Snowden case. But like any smart government agency, they use a great deal of open source software and collaborate with the open source community. The agency recently open-sourced an internal software, and the new open source project is called Gaffer.
The project is released under the Apache license. Its GitHub page explains that “Gaffer is a framework that makes it easy to store large-scale graphs containing nodes and edges with statistical data such as counts, histograms, and sketches. These statistics can summarize the properties of nodes and edges over time windows, and they can also be dynamically updated over time.”
Not a huge story, but certainly interesting.
9. Hacking Your Own Car Is Now Legal
Automakers have been using copyright law to restrict modifications to their own vehicles, and even to hide defects in their cars. Now consumers have achieved a major victory: in October, the U.S. Library of Congress allowed the inspection and modification of software in cars and other vehicles.
This decision is becoming increasingly important for automakers, notably as Volkswagen was found to be using software to circumvent emissions testing. The automaker was using copyright law to prevent users from inspecting their own vehicle software. Their argument was that customers could “tweak” the software to circumvent safety and emissions regulations.