The Rise of InnerSource

We have all witnessed the rise of open-source - "open-source is eating the world", is an often-heard phrase. It was really only a matter of time, until organizations started to look beyond the open-source software they used, and at what made it possible to build and maintain it.
InnerSource is the answer.
In 2023, Gartner listed InnerSource as one of the top strategic technology trends in Software Engineering in 2023. At Bosch, we embarked on our InnerSource journey 14 years earlier.

But what is InnerSource in the first place?
In a nutshell, InnerSource is a software development approach which applies the open-source working model and collaboration culture inside an organization. It fosters the values and best practices of the open-source world, that have made it such a success.
Transparency, openness, self-organization, and meritocracy are key values for InnerSource communities. They are also what enables asynchronous, distributed work, which is the norm in the open-source world. Frequent code reviews, the contributor-maintainer model, and a focus on product, rather than process are also defining traits of InnerSource.

We have started our InnerSource journey in 2009 well ahead of most players in the industry. We knew going in, that InnerSource constituted a radical departure from our collaboration culture at the time, which was shaped by over 120 years of successful engineering in mostly non-software domains. We therefore decided to start InnerSource as a time limited and protected experiment in corporate research, which would allow the InnerSource practitioners to validate whether or not InnerSource would work and yield benefits for Bosch.
And so they did.

In the past 15 years, we have seen the rapid development of new, innovative and in some cases award-winning solutions in InnerSource communities. We have witnessed how InnerSource kickstarts and fosters asynchronous collaboration across organisational boundaries.
When Covid hit in 2021, the change from working in our offices to working from home was seamless for those practicing InnerSource, already. We have seen community developed solutions emerging as standards and replacing double developments.

InnerSource practitioners reported, that they had never learned as fast and as much as they did collaborating with other InnerSource practitioners. Furthermore, we have learned that InnerSource makes Bosch an even more attractive employer for software talent.
In summary, InnerSource fosters cross-divisional collaboration and learning, boosts innovation and accelerates development.

The appeal of InnerSource also shows in our numbers.
By 2024, the InnerSource community at Bosch grew to about 34,000 members from over 150 business units in more than 50 countries. Since 2009, they have created roughly 12,000 InnerSource code repositories and have made about 1 million code contributions.

The term InnerSource has been coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2001. However, InnerSource as a concept and a practice has only started to gain traction in the industry with the foundation of the InnerSource Commons(ISC) community in 2015, and the subsequent incorporation as a non-profit corporation in 2020.
In a nutshell, the mission of the ISC is to build and nurture a strong, inclusive community and industry partnerships, acting as a central collaboration hub and as an independent steward for the InnerSource body of knowledge, thereby empowering the InnerSource practitioners.
Luckily for all who want to embark on their InnerSource journey, they get to stand on the shoulder of giants and get to benefit from all the ideas and lessons learned captured by the ISC.

Bosch has been an active member and contributor since the very first community meeting in Palo Alto.
We have authored an article in the free O'Reilly publication Adopting InnerSource, have shared a number of InnerSource Patterns, contributed to the InnerSource Learning Path trainings, and hosted one of the InnerSource Commons summits in Renningen in 2018.

On that note: "May the InnerSource be with you, always!"