The importance of open source to global innovation can’t be underestimated, though it is sometimes misunderstood.

Open source technology, and its coding communities, have underpinned so much of the innovation on cloud computing, that the speed of this innovation coupled with its complexity and pervasiveness have been responsible for -- but not always acknowledged for -- much of cloud computing’s heavy lifting. Likewise, Open source will likely compose much of the future of cloud innovation, too, and we hope to spur that along with you.

With its history of solving complex, layered and intracted engineering problems by harnessing the world’s collective ingenuity, as well as its very best coders, open source is a natural fit for helping to solve some of our world’s most intractable dilemmas, too.

This is why Call for Code uses, and depends, on open source tech.

This year’s Call for Code Global Challenge began in February focused on our world’s toughest dilemmas, like the need to find solutions for climate change and the impacts of natural disasters.

However, as we all know, another one of the world’s pressing problems eclipsed even the growing urgency of climate change, and brought us all together even more closely -- in ways we couldn’t have imagined in February. Call for Code then called upon developers globally again to help find the urgently needed solutions to help ameliorate the COVID-19 pandemic. One of those solutions, Safe Queue, shows that a developer’s ingenuity, combined with open source technology, could create solutions to help keep the world safe, even as we sheltered in place.

A special award at ATO 2020

Just a week after the announcement of this year’s Call for Code global winners on October 13th, we’ll honor the top North America regional Call for Code winner during ATO2020, and honor them with a $5000 prize for best submission. We’ll also be making other acknowledgments, awards and important announcements during the show – more than in any other past ATO.

For ATO2020, IBM’s presence will explore more ways open source tech can be used to improve cloud computing and the world, to help bring us all together. IBM has had over 25 years working with open source, and Linux/Apache foundations investing multi-billion dollar infusions to support this technology, and to spur the creation of new foundations, leading to millions of lines of code in these communities.

Today, IBM has 3,000 active developers participating in open source every month, including committers and maintainers in some of the biggest open projects. One of them, master inventor, Lin Sun, will be at All things Open 2020 to do her virtual book signing of her Ebook on Istio and service mesh. We’ll also have Distinguished Engineer, Brad Topol exploring the fundamentals of Kubernetes, as well as its advanced platform capabilities.

We look forward to you stopping by our virtual booth or joining us at our many virtual breakout sessions during All Things Open. Bring your interest. Bring your expertise and bring your questions and challenges, and we’ll look to help bring you the insight you need to make the next big coding advancement on the cloud.

We want to thank ATO and those contributors to open source for harnessing our collective energy and bringing us all together again.

This post is part of the 2020 ATO Sponsor Series where sponsors discuss a a topic of interest, a session they're hosting or simply what they'll be doing in the exhibit area. IBM is a Presenting level sponsor.