Companies today can’t get away with not using open source, says Guy Martin, Director, Open@Autodesk, who recently sat down with us for a deep dive into Autodesk’s engagement with and contributions to the open source community.
“Like any company… we consume a lot of open source,” said Martin, “I was brought in to help Autodesk’s open source strategy in terms of how we contribute back more effectively to open source, how we open source code within our environment, which we want to be a standard — code which is non-differentiating and not strategic IP.”
But it’s not easy for a large company like Autodesk to engage with the open source community. Because they also have industry-leading proprietary solutions, they need to be extra careful with consuming and contributing to open source. They need to understand various licenses to avoid legal complexity, and they must be aware that releasing some code may also expose company IP. These are areas where all companies must tread carefully, and developers need to be fully confident that they can use code efficiently without dealing with a heavyweight process to get permissions for using or contributing.
“There needs to be a process around what we are going to open source which involves legal at a very early stage,” Martin said.
Read more at The Linux Foundation
