It’s 2019, Microsoft under the leadership of Satya Nadella is now known to be a company that’s in favor of the open-source ideology, and free sharing of its resources.
But its turn out MS wants to go to another level and formally bring the concept of inner-source inside the company (via ZDNet). Now you’re very well aware of what is open source. The idea of “Inner Source” is along similar lines.
The big difference is that “inner source” is limited to a particular organization and not the general public like it happens in the case of open source.
It’s to bring more to open collaboration and sharing of code between the teams. For example, resources like the code, issue tracker, documentation are readily available to all the employees who work in a particular organization.
This adds better possibilities for code reuse, cutting down development costs, improving the quality of the code, and also making the development process easy for the developers.
All of this could be beneficial considering Microsoft’s size, and the different areas where it’s putting its efforts. However, inner-source is not a Microsoft-led concept, it has been known for years. You have examples like SAP, Google, IBM, HP, and more.
In 2018, Microsoft purchased the code-sharing website GitHub and so it created a platform where its employees can collaborate on inner source development. Also, the company made a couple of job postings last year to hire program managers who can work and make GitHub an important tool for their inner source road map.
