Abstract
The world has been recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and is coming towards its post-pandemic era. Although many IT companies have experienced big growth during the pandemic caused by the increasing demand of several kinds of services, finding highly skilled IT professionals is essential to the expansion of the business and was never an easy task, even before the pandemic. The leveraging of remote work during the last years collaborated substantially with companies in order to expand their teams across the globe and find talented people that would never have been found within the pre-pandemic environment. However, apart from the new working models and environments in the IT sector, the FOSS model always posed as an outstanding framework not only to leverage projects but also to help in finding talented people throughout the world. This short chapter presents a brief overview about how FOSS can be used to help companies leverage their businesses and expand teams by reaching professionals with a good matching profile.
TopProfessional Career
Although terms such as Open Source, Free Software, and Pervasive Computing might still sound like innovation for many people, they were coined decades ago. By the time the Open Source definition was coined in 1998 (Stone et al., 1999), Free Software Foundation was more than 10 years old and GNU GPL licenses(GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses, 2023) were well established even though the computing market was still dominated by proprietary software and business models. The hardware evolved fast and the development of microelectronics and manufacturing techniques of integrated circuits leveraged embedded systems and portable platforms, allowing miniaturization, reducing costs, and making them accessible to the general public. As a consequence, there was a boom of computer devices in our society: routers, smartphones, TVs, tablets, sensors, and several other devices became common in most environments and transformed the pervasive computing, already discussed and predicted years ago(Satyanarayanan, 2001), into a reality. In this context, FOSS also evolved through countless successful projects which have paved the way for newer (non-proprietary) business models, innovation, and acceleration of software development. Nowadays Open Source is everywhere, from robotic toys (Personal Robots, 2019) to Satellites(Labrèche et al., 2022), driving cloud and internet infrastructure, and running on billions of devices such as smartphones and TVs. Some of its main advantages are:
Key Terms in this Chapter
FOSS: Stands for Free and Open Source Software.
Time-to-Market: The total amount of time that takes a product to become available for sale since its conception.
Software Development Process: Are the steps, procedures, the general approach followed to break the development of a software into several steps that can be smaller and executed sequentially or in parallel with the goal to improve the design and product management.
Maintainer: Is the software developer responsible for an entire project or part of it, it takes the decisions about which code should be merged or purged from sources, analysis collaborations, mediate conflicts, can be the responsible for releases, it can be seen as a technical leader.