Open Source for Good with Kevin Fleming

The OCTOpod: Conversations with SUSE's Office of the CTO

Bloomberg has been fostering open solutions for the financial industry for quite some time, so it should come as no surprise that they also have been actively engaged in the open source community, with an eye toward promoting more rapid innovation across all aspects of the organization worldwide. Today, we're talking about open source for good with a Member of the Bloomberg CTO Office, Kevin Fleming. Kevin focuses on Bloomberg’s technology community engagement, including the company's involvement in open source projects and standards. He has been an open-source developer and project manager for nearly three decades and, in today’s episode, he shares what the term ‘open source for good’ means to Bloomberg and how it fits into the company’s strong philanthropic history. Tuning in, you’ll learn about the reciprocal relationship Bloomberg has built with the open-source community, some of the hurdles Kevin has had to overcome in implementing the open-source programs at Bloomberg, and the main benefits of these programs for Bloomberg and other organizations, plus a whole lot more! We hope you’ll join us.

Key Points From This Episode:

• How Bloomberg benefits from open source technology, including better tools, community participation, and skill building for their engineers.
• The reciprocal relationship that Bloomberg has built with the open source community.
• How the concept of ‘open source for good’ fits into Bloomberg’s strong philanthropic history.
• How the program changed over time and what they learned from its successes and failures.
• Learn about Tech at Bloomberg, the company’s innovation communications brand.
• Kevin describes the time and resources that go into user experience design at Bloomberg.
• How open source software has evolved to become increasingly end user facing.
• Some of the hurdles that Kevin has had to overcome, such as figuring out how to educate ‘non-technologists’ about open source.
• The main benefit of Bloomberg’s open source programs: continuous education for software developers in a rapidly evolving landscape.
• Why Kevin is hopeful that we’ll see more Fortune 500 companies taking on similar programs.
• The spirit of collaboration rather than competition that could grow this idea.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Kevin Fleming on LinkedIn

Kevin Fleming on Twitter

Bloomberg

Tech at Bloomberg

Apache Software Foundation

Python Software Foundation

Software in the Public Interest (SPI)

Solr

Hadoop

Project Jupyter

SUSE

Alan Clark