Boeing, with around 6,000 engineers, is emphasizing open source engagement by focusing on three main themes, according to Damani Corbin, who heads Boeing's Open Source office. He joined our host, Alex Williams, for a discussion at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Chicago.

The first priority Corbin talks about is simplifying the consumption of open source software for developers. Second, Boeing aims to facilitate developer contributions to open source projects, fostering involvement in communities like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Linux Foundation. The third theme involves identifying opportunities for "inner sourcing" to share internally developed solutions across different groups.

Boeing is actively working to break down barriers and encourage code reuse across the organization, promoting participation in open source initiatives. Corbin highlights the importance of separating business-critical components from those that can be shared with the community, prioritizing security and extending efforts to enhance open source security practices. The organization is consolidating its open source strategy by collaborating with legal and information security teams.

Corbin emphasizes the goal of making open source involvement accessible and attractive, with a phased approach to encourage meaningful contributions and ultimately enabling the compensation of engineers for open source work in the future.

Learn more from The New Stack about Boeing and CNCF open source projects:

How Boeing Uses Cloud Native

How Open Source Has Turned the Tables on Enterprise Software

Scaling Open Source Community by Getting Closer to Users

Mercedes-Benz: 4 Reasons to Sponsor Open Source Projects