Community Matters

As a vice president of technology at Dell Technologies, Josh Bernstein has many responsibilities, but the project closest to his heart is {code} [1], which Dell inherited by acquiring EMC. {code} is a collection of open source projects maintained or supported by Dell. According to Bernstein, "A lot of times older legacy organizations don't really get open source. They don't understand how to market it. {code} was created to develop a brand for the community, to make Dell relevant to a community that did not interact with them, didn't trust large enterprise brands. The {code} team is a collection of open source engineers and advocates inside Dell Technologies that are working to better support the community and engage Dell Technologies with the community."

Dell is not new to open source. They worked on Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) and Redfish, and they wrote open source drivers for hardware on the Linux kernel. Some of the big open source projects that came directly from Dell include EdgeX Foundry, which is now a Linux Foundation collaborative project. OpenSwitch is another big project to which Dell contributed. Most Linux users may be familiar with the project Sputnik, which offers high-end Dell systems with fully supported Linux distributions.

"Dell was doing all this open source work, but nobody knew about it," said Bernstein. "EMC was doing a lot of work specifically in the storage data center infrastructure. When the two companies were combined, there was actually a lot of synergy between the two. We naturally found each other and just increased everybody's voice in the whole community."

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