Why enterprises should embrace open source

As everybody is aware of, the code for open source software (OSS) is made available with a license within which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the code to anyone for any purpose. OSS is usually developed in a very collaborative public manner, relying on the intelligence and creativity of crowd sourcing to create systems, applications, and infrastructure that in several cases rivals that of its proprietary, closed-source cousin.

Competition drives innovation and pushes businesses forward. however, there’s nothing quite thus impactful as harnessing the collective genius of the community of developers – and that’s what open source technology allows.

Open source platforms like GitHub catalyze innovation, development, and growth in industries as diverse as healthcare to airline travel. If enterprises forget about these traits, we may as well pull the shutters down and leap returned into that early ninety’s bunker.

The good news is, there’s growth in open source revenues and also in participation throughout the board. Black Duck and North Bridge these days recently ran their tenth annual open source survey. The range of groups and organizations collaborating in open source projects today has risen by 50 percent since 2014; with 66 percentage of the survey respondents doing so – and this is often expected to rise to 88 percent within the next three years.

The advantages of open source

This is exciting that Enterprises recognize the blessings of open source-licensed products:

• Greater transparency:

Not simply the source code to be available, all of the layout design deliberations, etc., are out in the open, in contrast to the secretive approaches of proprietary companies. It’s easy to assess the product and its community and decide if the usage of the product is a good selection.

• Greater innovation:

Open source development reflects Bill Joy’s law: No matter who you are, most of the best folks work for somebody else. That’s true for all software program providers, so the usage of a product with a probably a whole lot number of developer base enables access to more innovation. There’s one another way where this is true, however: By allowing anyone to contribute code, it allows an open source product to include uncommon use cases, which a proprietary vendor would either ignore or dismiss.

• Greater ability to affect product direction.

It’s a cliché of the software industry. If you’re a small customer of a significant proprietary software vendor, you better wish your product objectives align with the vendor or its large users; otherwise, your feature requests will get tossed in the circular document. With open source, you can directly interact with developers to provide your use cases; if important enough, you can make contributions of code that implements your favored functionality.

Considering open source on your company?

Build open source competencies or skills. Being fully engaged in open source is much more than downloading and installing software elements for an application. Understanding the development pace, likely sparseness of documentation, and the need for self-reliance is all part of adopting an open source product.

Identify your key source components. While open source may be spread throughout your applications, certain components will represent crucial dependencies. Those are ones you need to be sure about concerning their maturity, community size and robustness, and openness to code contributions and functional guidelines.

Watch out for the new legacy:

Many IT companies leverage open source components to develop new programs and applications, forgetting that those applications become an ongoing engineering commitment. I see this within the Docker space, where many IT businesses, excited by the potential capability of Docker, have built home-grown DevOps tool chains that string together open source components.

IBM Home for Open Source:

IBMers are building innovative new open source projects right now! Choose from cloud, analytics, blockchain, IoT — whatever your area of interest, we have the code for you.

Some of the popular Open source projects from IBM are listed below:

Aardpfark:

Exporting Spark ML Models to the Portable Format for Analytics

Accessibility Probe (AccProbe):

The Accessibility Probe (AccProbe) is a standalone, Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application that combines the functionality of numerous accessibility tools, including object inspection, event monitoring, and execution of accessibility APIs.

AI Fairness 360:

The AI Fairness 360 toolkit (AIF360) is an open source software toolkit that can help detect and remove bias in machine learning models.

Amalgam8:

Amalgam8 is an open source platform to simplify integration tasks for polyglot microservices, enabling developers to focus on high-value DevOps functions.

and Many more projects are already made open source by IBM on their website:

Coding:  Embrace open Source

from __future__ import division, print_function, absolute_import

import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
import time

# Import MNIST data
from tensorflow.examples.tutorials.mnist import input_data
mnist = input_data.read_data_sets("/tmp/data/", one_hot=True)

# Training Parameters
num_gpus = 2
num_steps = 200
learning_rate = 0.001
batch_size = 1024
display_step = 10

# Network Parameters
num_input = 784 # MNIST data input (img shape: 28*28)
num_classes = 10 # MNIST total classes (0-9 digits)
dropout = 0.75 # Dropout, probability to keep units


# Build a convolutional neural network
def conv_net(x, n_classes, dropout, reuse, is_training):
    # Define a scope for reusing the variables
    with tf.variable_scope('ConvNet', reuse=reuse):
        # MNIST data input is a 1-D vector of 784 features (28*28 pixels)
        # Reshape to match picture format [Height x Width x Channel]
        # Tensor input become 4-D: [Batch Size, Height, Width, Channel]
        x = tf.reshape(x, shape=[-1, 28, 28, 1])

        # Convolution Layer with 64 filters and a kernel size of 5
        x = tf.layers.conv2d(x, 64, 5, activation=tf.nn.relu)
        # Max Pooling (down-sampling) with strides of 2 and kernel size of 2
        x = tf.layers.max_pooling2d(x, 2, 2)

        # Convolution Layer with 256 filters and a kernel size of 5
        x = tf.layers.conv2d(x, 256, 3, activation=tf.nn.relu)
        # Convolution Layer with 512 filters and a kernel size of 5
        x = tf.layers.conv2d(x, 512, 3, activation=tf.nn.relu)
        # Max Pooling (down-sampling) with strides of 2 and kernel size of 2
        x = tf.layers.max_pooling2d(x, 2, 2)

        # Flatten the data to a 1-D vector for the fully connected layer
        x = tf.contrib.layers.flatten(x)

        # Fully connected layer (in contrib folder for now)
        x = tf.layers.dense(x, 2048)
        # Apply Dropout (if is_training is False, dropout is not applied)
        x = tf.layers.dropout(x, rate=dropout, training=is_training)

        # Fully connected layer (in contrib folder for now)
        x = tf.layers.dense(x, 1024)
        # Apply Dropout (if is_training is False, dropout is not applied)
        x = tf.layers.dropout(x, rate=dropout, training=is_training)

        # Output layer, class prediction
        out = tf.layers.dense(x, n_classes)
        # Because 'softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits' loss already apply
        # softmax, we only apply softmax to testing network
        out = tf.nn.softmax(out) if not is_training else out

    return out


def average_gradients(tower_grads):
    average_grads = []
    for grad_and_vars in zip(*tower_grads):
        # Note that each grad_and_vars looks like the following:
        #   ((grad0_gpu0, var0_gpu0), ... , (grad0_gpuN, var0_gpuN))
        grads = []
        for g, _ in grad_and_vars:
            # Add 0 dimension to the gradients to represent the tower.
            expanded_g = tf.expand_dims(g, 0)

            # Append on a 'tower' dimension which we will average over below.
            grads.append(expanded_g)

        # Average over the 'tower' dimension.
        grad = tf.concat(grads, 0)
        grad = tf.reduce_mean(grad, 0)

        # Keep in mind that the Variables are redundant because they are shared
        # across towers. So .. we will just return the first tower's pointer to
        # the Variable.
        v = grad_and_vars[0][1]
        grad_and_var = (grad, v)
        average_grads.append(grad_and_var)
    return average_grads


# By default, all variables will be placed on '/gpu:0'
# So we need a custom device function, to assign all variables to '/cpu:0'
# Note: If GPUs are peered, '/gpu:0' can be a faster option
PS_OPS = ['Variable', 'VariableV2', 'AutoReloadVariable']

def assign_to_device(device, ps_device='/cpu:0'):
    def _assign(op):
        node_def = op if isinstance(op, tf.NodeDef) else op.node_def
        if node_def.op in PS_OPS:
            return "/" + ps_device
        else:
            return device

    return _assign


# Place all ops on CPU by default
with tf.device('/cpu:0'):
    tower_grads = []
    reuse_vars = False

    # tf Graph input
    X = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, num_input])
    Y = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, num_classes])

    # Loop over all GPUs and construct their own computation graph
    for i in range(num_gpus):
        with tf.device(assign_to_device('/gpu:{}'.format(i), ps_device='/cpu:0')):

            # Split data between GPUs
            _x = X[i * batch_size: (i+1) * batch_size]
            _y = Y[i * batch_size: (i+1) * batch_size]

            # Because Dropout have different behavior at training and prediction time, we
            # need to create 2 distinct computation graphs that share the same weights.

            # Create a graph for training
            logits_train = conv_net(_x, num_classes, dropout,
                                    reuse=reuse_vars, is_training=True)
            # Create another graph for testing that reuse the same weights
            logits_test = conv_net(_x, num_classes, dropout,
                                   reuse=True, is_training=False)

            # Define loss and optimizer (with train logits, for dropout to take effect)
            loss_op = tf.reduce_mean(tf.nn.softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits(
                logits=logits_train, labels=_y))
            optimizer = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(learning_rate=learning_rate)
            grads = optimizer.compute_gradients(loss_op)

            # Only first GPU compute accuracy
            if i == 0:
                # Evaluate model (with test logits, for dropout to be disabled)
                correct_pred = tf.equal(tf.argmax(logits_test, 1), tf.argmax(_y, 1))
                accuracy = tf.reduce_mean(tf.cast(correct_pred, tf.float32))

            reuse_vars = True
            tower_grads.append(grads)

    tower_grads = average_gradients(tower_grads)
    train_op = optimizer.apply_gradients(tower_grads)

    # Initialize the variables (i.e. assign their default value)
    init = tf.global_variables_initializer()

    # Start Training
    with tf.Session() as sess:

        # Run the initializer
        sess.run(init)

        # Keep training until reach max iterations
        for step in range(1, num_steps + 1):
            # Get a batch for each GPU
            batch_x, batch_y = mnist.train.next_batch(batch_size * num_gpus)
            # Run optimization op (backprop)
            ts = time.time()
            sess.run(train_op, feed_dict={X: batch_x, Y: batch_y})
            te = time.time() - ts
            if step % display_step == 0 or step == 1:
                # Calculate batch loss and accuracy
                loss, acc = sess.run([loss_op, accuracy], feed_dict={X: batch_x,
                                                                     Y: batch_y})
                print("Step " + str(step) + ": Minibatch Loss= " + \
                      "{:.4f}".format(loss) + ", Training Accuracy= " + \
                      "{:.3f}".format(acc) + ", %i Examples/sec" % int(len(batch_x)/te))
            step += 1
        print("Optimization Finished!")

        # Calculate accuracy for MNIST test images
        print("Testing Accuracy:", \
            np.mean([sess.run(accuracy, feed_dict={X: mnist.test.images[i:i+batch_size],
            Y: mnist.test.labels[i:i+batch_size]}) for i in range(0, len(mnist.test.images), batch_size)]))

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