Open Source: Contributing Code to a Rapidly Changing World
The team at Data Machines Corp. has a vision to improve the world by developing technologies to enable data-driven decision-making. To do this, we stand behind four core technological values: open source software; technology agnostic selection; full stack development; and automatic, intelligent designs. Each of these values ensures that we as a company contribute to the betterment of society, one line of code at a time.
“Open source allows people to take the source code and – respecting the attribution requests – integrate components of technology into their own models/technical solution,” says DMC Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Martial Michel. “It empowers developers to learn from existing technology.” He adds, “Open-source projects have brought significant changes to the technical landscape, giving a new set of tools to researchers, developers, and users. Open Source projects such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, Python, Go, TensorFlow, OpenCV, and let’s not forget the Linux kernel. Open Source drives the rapid growth we see in IT in many fields: High-Performance Computing, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Medical Science, and many more”.
We understand the restraints that closed-source software creates for progressing independent programmers, engineers, and scientists, including, but not limited to, higher financial costs and a limited community of collaboration. But the reason we choose open source to begin with is that multiple users can access and test the code, which means that it can only improve with the public’s input and feedback. DMC sincerely believes in the power of collaboration and teamwork when it comes to technological development, so we work to create and update a code and platform that is both open to the public and ready to be used and tested, all without attaching elaborate and costly licensing schemes to our product.
“Open software and standards are a foundation for innovative and essential work in science, education, government, and industry,” says DMC CEO Eric Whyne. “We, along with our customers, are committed to releasing our solutions to benefit these global communities.” These beliefs are evident in the construction of our code on open platforms, and our experience and willingness to teach open-source languages.
Open Source Platforms We Use: Our coding relies on open-source/open-development platforms such as OpenStack, Docker, and Kubernetes. As a relatively young company, these open-source platforms are the most efficient ways for us to build and develop our own innovations while still inspiring other innovators. For instance, several of our employees inspire said innovators by providing the GitHub community with more than 50 repositories on the company’s Github page providing both code and documentation. Moreover, on DMC’s lanyard, we incorporated some of our most important command lines, e.g. ssh user@server, the command to login to a server with a secure shell, which not only represents our strong belief in open source, but encourages safe deployment practices to users. In addition, using these open-source platforms to constantly collaborate and brainstorm allows us to keep our systems and software up to date, so a user of our product will always have the most current version. But, remaining flexible and current in the rapidly changing tech industry involves more than just having a reliable open-source system; it also involves experience in said system, experience that members of our company have and are willing to share.
Gaining and Sharing Our Experiences: Several members of our own development team have prior experience in open-source software and cloud structures, as well as in open-source coding and languages. One of our team members, Dr. Martial Michel co-wrote the NIST SP500 "The NIST Cloud Federation Reference Architecture" (NIST SP500-323) published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is the source for such Special Publications (SP) used by institutes all over the world. Dr. Michel also maintains the "cuda_tensorflow_opencv" Dockerfile and its built images that aid in the design of GPU-enabled Computer Vision and Machine Learning solutions. This Open Source project is available as one of DMC's Github repositories. Similarly, Dr. Chris Monson teaches open-source programming languages to anyone interested in the software development field. Having previously worked at Google, he is knowledgeable in GO! and Python, two open-source languages that stand as the foundation for aspiring developers. He, along with his coauthor Seth Nielson, recently published a book on the latter language titled Practical Cryptography in Python: Learning Correct Cryptography by Example, outlining the proper purpose and usage for Python coding. This experience and expertise allows our company to provide the most advanced and accurate system possible to our clients, and also allows the clients to further understand and utilize its more advanced features.
Keeping the flow of technological innovation open for widespread experimentation and development is important to DMC – so important that we have built our networks off of open-source platforms and are willing to share our knowledge with aspiring developers. All of these services are provided in a secure and affordable system where users may freely express themselves and collaborate with the scientific community.
