Open source technologies today are the keys to speeding innovation for large and small businesses that are little able to achieve their mission without them. Open source is a critical element of VMware strategy as well. It is not just about using open source software and achieving the symbiotic existence of proprietary products and services with open source components. It’s also about providing open source code improvement that makes technology better for everyone.
Our mission is to build VMware’s presence and influence in relevant and leading-edge open source projects through meaningful contributions and participation and to establish VMware as a good citizen of the open source world contributing to the good of the projects and the industry.
“A tool will enhance efficiency, NOT effectiveness.”
Not only do we join existing open source communities to support and contribute to, but create new ones around open source projects with unique and desired features and functionalities that benefit the entire industry. And we try to apply high-quality standards for each of them just like we do for all the VMware products and services.
The need to create consistency and ensure a positive experience for all of our teams working with GitHub was recognized some time ago when we laid the foundation for our teams with the GitHub Manager and CLA Portal tools. We’ve increased our focus and investment in order to provide appropriate access and improve the flow of information, to structure repositories in a way to encourage high-quality contribution and to accurately measure project health.
“People without process is action without effectiveness.”
We’ve realized that a tool will enhance efficiency, NOT effectiveness, and people without process is action without effectiveness – so we decided to focus on the process first. Our open source community strategy and compliance program managers are working closely together to streamline it – documenting and analyzing the current workflow, reaching out to the contributors to identify gaps, pain points, bottlenecks, steps consuming too much time or causing delays. As soon as we redesign the process to ensure effectiveness, our tooling engineers will transform the tools in a way to enhance efficiency.
Stay tuned to find out how we boosted contributor experience and contribution quality.
