It’s one of the confounding facts of the software ecosystem that much of the best software is free. You might not know it, but you depend on free, “open-source” software every day. Firefox, Google Chrome, the Android Operating System and most Internet servers are open source. At Rhythmic Technologies, we’ve embraced open source and not only use it but contribute back to it.

Using open source provides advantages on at least three levels.

First, it’s zero-cost, which is to say there’s no monetary fee associated with its use.

Second, it allows our engineers to dive right into the source code and see how the technologies work. Even if the codebase is too deep for a single engineer to get a good grasp of, they can always rely on others who’ve come before them and have written a blog or the like.

Finally, support is often better than with closed-source software. Open-source software is often only staffed by volunteers who do this out of their own enthusiasm, so although the outcome is ironic, one can understand why. When the worker’s motivations are entirely intrinsic, it’s no longer a job but a passion.

For Rhythmic, the epicenter for our open-source impact is our GitHub organization. For those who aren’t in the know, GitHub has become the de facto home for open-source code and hosts the source code for everything from games to operating systems. 

Of particular interest to our team are two projects, Terraform and Ansible, which are hosted on GitHub along with vibrant ecosystems of modules and plugins. Our developers use Terraform to define infrastructure as code and Ansible to define its configuration. Put them together and you have a recipe for automating the creation and maintenance of entire organizations in the cloud! Our developers have contributed 43 Terraform modules and 14 Ansible roles to the open-source community, which can be found on our Terraform registry and our Ansible Galaxy page.

If you want to get started contributing to open-source software we’d be more than happy to review your pull request!