Uber began its open source journey in 2015 when three passionate engineers decided to contribute Uber’s work back to the community. In only four years, Uber’s open source program has fostered 350+ outstanding open source projects with 2,000+ contributors worldwide delivering over 70,000 commits. Since 2017, four of Uber’s open source projects have won InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Software Awards. In this talk, Brian Hsieh & Marin Dimitrov will share more details on Uber’s open source journey, program and best practices, and how Uber enables open innovation by fostering a healthy and collaborative open source culture

1. Marin Dimitrov
Uber Engineering Sofia
Open Source @ Uber

2. Topics
History of Open Source @ Uber
Establishing an Open Source Program
Goals, Activities and Principles
Success Stories

4. Uber Engineering Sofia
site founded
2013 teammates
60+
Uber Engineering site
outside of San Francisco
1st

6. History of Open Source @ Uber
2012
First project on GitHub
Volunteers, informal program
2015
Released deck.gl
2016
Released Jaeger
2017
Released Horovod, Pyro, RIBs
Jaeger hosted by CNCF
Hired first FTE for open source
2018 H1
Released M3, kepler.gl
Formalized open source program
2018 H2
Released H3, AresDB, Marmaray
Uber joined the Linux Foundation
Horovod hosted by LF AI
1st Uber Open Summit
2019
Pyro hosted by LF AI
Released Ludwig, Kraken, Peloton
2nd Uber Open Summit (Sofia)
Coined the program office (OSPO)
2009
Uber was born
Open source user since day 1
Open source contributor since early days: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Cassandra, Chef, Arrow, Go,
Buck, Kafka, Hive,
Mesos, Redis, SWIFT, Gradle, Gym, Parquet, Presto, and more

7. How Uber
started an Open
Source
Program
Need
Support the growth
More complicated use
cases
Collaborations

8. Benefits
Awareness
Development velocity &
innovation
Compliance
Influence

9. Responsibilities

10. “What are our open
source goals?”
“What do we want
from open source
activities?”

11. Open Source Goals & Activities
Engineering Economics
Consume
Create
Collaborate
ContributeTalent Acquisition and Retention
Industry Alignment

12. Contribute liberally, consume & create cautiously
Quality over quantity
Align with Uber’s business priorities
Focus on our primary goals
Uber’s OSPO Principles
Community collaboration for sustainability

13. “Our mission is to enable, educate,
champion, and foster open source
development, adoption and culture.
We are enablers rather than gatekeepers”

14. 2000+Projects and repositories
on GitHub
350+ Contributors around the
world
4Top open source projects on
InfoWorld’s awards list

15. 2000+
contributors

16. Enabling collaboration
through open source
Uber Open Source Mission
machine learning
mobile
infrastructure
web framework
data visualization
data platform
Horovod
Pyro
Jaeger
M3
visit opensource.uber.com for more projects
Free to use
Free to study
Free to modify
Free to distribute
AresDB
H3
Peloton

19. Contributions to existing projects
Arrow AOSP atary-py Bazel Buck
Checker Framework Cassandra Chef Distributed Tracing
Dagger 2 Error Prone Gym (Open AI) Golang Gradle
Hive Hadoop Kafka Kubeflow
Lottie Mesos Mock Moshi Parquet PyTorch
Retrofit Redis Spark Swift
TensorFlow Thrift ViewPump xgboost

20. Uber Engineering Sofia

21. “Enabling collaboration
through open source Infrastructure
Data
Machine Learning
Web
Mobile
Open Source

22. How Open Source Helps Our Team
Growth
Community
Learning
opportunities
Mentorship

23. Supporting the Open Source Community in
Sofia

24. Takeaways
Open Source as a competitive advantage -
economics, talent, alignment
Be clear on your goals and principles
You can start today (you don’t need an OSPO
from Day 1)

25. Thank you
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.
Marin Dimitrov
http://opensource.uber.com/