IBM may not be as splashy as some of the other tech giants that make big code contributions to open source. But as Chris Ferris, CTO for open technology at IBM says, “we’ve been involved in open source before open source was cool.”

By Ferris’ estimation, IBM ranks among the top three contributors in terms of code commits to open source project and contributors to the various open source communities. “It’s really significant,” he said. “We don’t run around with the vanity metrics the way some others do, but it’s really important to us.”

Ferris can’t quantify IBM’s open source investments. But think about all the different foundations of which IBM is a sponsor, he says. These include the Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Open Compute Project, OpenStack Foundation, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), among others.

“Most of the time we are a top-level sponsor, so that’s typically a quarter-million [dollars] a year. Plus all the contributions of engineers to those like CNCF, Kubernetes, and Hyperledger. You add it all up and we probably have as much, if not more, contributions into open source as any of the other leaders. We think it’s vitally important to our success and our strategy.”

And then there’s the company’s pending $34 billion Red Hat acquisition. The move illustrates the importance of open source to IBM’s cloud strategy — “open technology is the cloud strategy,” Ferris said — but it began way before this purchase.

“If I unwind the stack to the virtualization wars where we were all focused on data center virtualization and VMware seemed to be winning that particular battle, everyone was trying to get in the game,” he said. At the time, IBM had six virtualization products that weren’t interoperable, and that was “very confusing to IBM and our customers.” The company needed to figure out how to put itself in a position to compete against VMware “and we chose OpenStack for that. Rather than spend multiple years trying to smush together six solutions, we felt the best way was to embrace an emerging open source community.”

The company worked with Hewlett Packard, AT&T, and others to make the case for open governance of OpenStack software to co-founder Rackspace. “And then we embraced that for our own private cloud approach,” Ferris said.

IBM also worked with Google, Docker, Red Hat, and others to launch CNCF to provide open governance for Kubernetes, which has since become the foundation for IBM’s private cloud. More recently it worked with many of those same companies on the Istio project, which is a service mesh management platform. And it also worked closely with Google on Knative, which uses Kubernetes as a bridge between enterprises and serverless deployments. While this and other cloud-native open source projects that IBM contributes to are still in their infancy among enterprise users, “a year-plus down the road, these projects will be very important.”

In addition to these cloud native technologies, IBM worked with the Linux Foundation to establish Hyperledger, contributing 44,000 lines of code and establishing the blockchain group's first project: Hyperledger Fabric.

The reason for IBM’s commitment to open source is two-fold. “One of the reasons is that’s what our customers are looking for,” Ferris said. “They don’t want to be locked into any one vendor, they want interoperability and affordability, and the way to do that is through open technology."

The second reason, he said, is that “we do firmly believe it leads to a better outcome. We’re able to innovate more quickly than if we were trying to compete with the rest of the world on our own. We benefit from the ideas of the broader communities and we’re able to contribute to those as well.”