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From Closed To Collaborative: Lessons From Qualcomm’s Open Development Experience - Rashmi Chitrakar, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
For more than 15 years, Qualcomm’s been actively involved in a range of Open Source ecosystems. Until recently, some parts of our development were handled behind closed doors, with contributions coming later and upstream enablement sometimes being limited. We tried various projects and partnerships to push things upstream sooner, but it wasn’t until lately that we truly made a complete shift.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve totally revisited our approach—moving an entire Linux product development ecosystem, with hundreds of contributors, from a private downstream setup to a full-blown Open Development model. This wasn’t just a surface change: it meant overhauling how our engineers work, syncing up our internal systems with open practices, and fundamentally changing the way our developers connect and collaborate.
In this session, we’ll share what made this transition work for us—including how we managed to weave our internal systems into Open Source workflows, encouraged developers to embrace new ways of thinking, and built scalable processes that can handle all sorts of Linux ecosystems and distributions.