OpenUK is a not-for-profit company that “harnesses the power of collaboration around Open Technology being open source software, open source hardware, and open data, in the UK.” Collaboration is central to everything OpenUk do, as they use it to bring together businesses, public sectors, and communities in the UK to collaborate locally and globally.
Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, spoke with OpenUK about his journey with Open Source Software and how Civo continue to contribute to the sector.
“I believe it’s important that we contribute to open source and give back to communities in general – many of our staff collaborate a lot within the CNCF. We’ve also built a free Academy for the Kubernetes community. We’ve developed 60 videos on our website, completely free for learning, to give back to grass roots,” explained Mark Boost, CEO of Civo.
The process of acquiring IT has changed over the years through the shift of power in Open Source. This was further driven by the growing ability to freely use Open Source Software and acquire it via repositories like GitHub and GitLab. Open Source code that is pre-licensed and freely available invalidates the need for a budget or a contract to allow the use of the software.
“In Civo today, we have a number of projects on GitHub that are Open Source and available to use. Some of those are quite specific to Civo, so you can only use them with Civo. But we’ve decided to open source and in theory people can fork that code, and use for other projects,” said Mark.
OpenUK’s survey revealed that some consume and distribute Open Source Software but do not contribute to that code in the name of maintenance, collaboration, and evolving the code they consume and distribute. This can have knock-on effects on the security of the software as it’s not tended to or bettered. There can be a severe lack of awareness towards good housekeeping and governance that follow best Open Source Software practices despite those same entities distributing it.
“Most of our hires now come from our Slack community, where people have reached out to us, and we’ve hired people. Because it’s amazing when you see these people out there who from the goodness of their own heart develop code and contribute to your projects. It’s a very powerful thing,” Mark said proudly.
If you feel you have something to contribute to Civo and the open source world, check out our careers page.
Find out more about the OpenUK report and words from our CEO Mark Boost here.