A few months ago some IBM leaders asked me a simple question: "How do we make IBM a more Open Source company?"

To me, this starts with the line engineers at the company. When they meet a challenge, do they use an open source tool? Do they contribute fixes and features to the tool? If they have to write their own code, does it eventually go open source?

IBM contributes both strategically and pragmatically to many open source projects already. Open Source is bundled in many if not most of the products we deliver to our customers. Our public cloud and consulting business units use a ton of foss in their day to day.

But we can do more and do better. We're redoing and reemphasizing all our open source training for engineers and for managers. We're changing our contribution policy to be more lightweight and flexible (CLAs as always are a challenge).

We're adopting a system similar to Red Hat's where engineers will own the copyright of code written off hours and can contribute that code to an upstream with zero company oversight.

My contribution to making IBM better was simple: "If you work at a big company like IBM you need to feel that the company is doing good in the world, not just acting in it's own interest"

So we created the Open Source Community Grant. This program empowers IBM employees who work in and with open source to choose where IBM gives support to causes that matter

Today we announced the 2nd community grant is going to @outreachy. $50k total grant (half cash and half cloud credits) https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/ibm-second-open-source-community-grant-outreachy/

The grantee is selected by IBM employees. First employees nominate organizations working in open source that do good in open source, then employees vote on which organization receives the grant.

IBM will probably always participate in the big open source foundations and conferences (whenever those come back) but that is driven by business need (product and customer)

This grant is also driven by a business need, our responsibility to our employees and our communities #GoodTechIBM #ProudIBMer

I'm happy to be able to work on this project. I'm looking forward to what @outreachy will accomplish going forward. And I'm excited to help award three more grants in 2020