Open source legend has it that Tim O’Reilly coined the term InnerSource back in 2000. While O’Reilly confesses that he doesn’t remember coming up with the term, he does remember recommending to IBM late in the 1990’s that they adopt some of the elements that make open source magic, namely — “collaboration, community, and low barriers to entry for those who wanted to share with each other.”
Today, more and more organizations are adopting InnerSource as a strategy, leveraging the methods and philosophy that power open source and make it great, to improve their internal development processes. InnerSource is the strategy incorporating open source methods into the development processes of commercial companies, and using them to create and publish proprietary software.
[Source: Security Boulevard]
