The Rise of the Open Source Professional

Whether you realize it or not, open source software affects just about everyone around the world, every single day. It’s used by almost any industry you can think of, including telecommunications, finance, healthcare, automotive, retail, entertainment and more. In the coming months and years, society will run even more on software built and maintained collaboratively by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Companies and organizations need to help to establish, build and sustain open source projects for the long term to accelerate innovation while reducing their R&D costs. To be successful, though, open source projects must possess a level of sophistication that solicits support from companies and developers. This is why the professionalization of open source is progressing at such a rapid pace.

Professionalizing and scaling the open source space requires specialized tools, licensing regimes, project governance, expert training, credible certifications and events that enable collaboration. In other words, a similar support ecosystem to that which has long been the standard for proprietary software, but operating on open source principles such as collaboration and open governance. Open source professionals are the individuals who make this happen. They include not only the Administrators and Engineers who deploy and manage systems and the developers who write the code, but also attorneys that ensure compliance with open source licenses, educators who teach new and existing professionals how to use the tools available to them, management teams that evaluate which projects to both invest in and implement and so many more.

The recent Linux Foundation and Dice Open Source Jobs Report found that identifying open source talent is not easy – 87 percent of hiring managers reported difficulty finding qualified individuals for these positions – while demand continues to be high, with 65 percent reporting they are expanding open source hiring more than other parts of their businesses. And it’s important to understand that open source professionals may be different than other employees, with only 2 percent stating money and perks to be the best part of their job – instead they like working on interesting projects (31 percent) and with the most cutting edge technologies (18 percent) in a global, collaborative community (17 percent).

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top engineers, developers and companies, working with the worldwide open source community to solve the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history, which together deliver an economic impact never seen before. We encourage more organizations to think about their open source strategy, hire individuals with the skills necessary to meet these challenges and train current staff in the latest, cutting-edge open source technologies. Those who do will reap the rewards of more effective technology at a lower cost, while helping to affect the lives of countless people in a positive way.

Learn more about open source training and certification options at https://training.linuxfoundation.org/.