Open source: Bringing joy to the intelligent automation and low-code world

Back in 2001, when open source software was still young, then-CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer declared it to be “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

The little Linux kernel that caused all that angst with a handful of part-time tinkerers has now exploded into a universe of open source software (or OSS) built upon millions of person-hours worth of contributions. Ironically, Microsoft is one of today’s biggest champions of Linux, and the enterprise-scale adoption of OSS in general, having contributed its own ubiquitously used VS Code IDE.

Until recently, most open source tools seemed to live nearer to the ‘roots’ of the software supply chain, making core operating systems, infrastructure automation and development tools more accessible and reusable for technical users. OSS was the domain of geeks constantly building and improving projects, not of business professionals using the application functionality itself.

Perhaps the myth that systems of process and systems of record contained the types of proprietary workflows and sensitive data that couldn’t be entrusted to a loosely-organized free-for-all of individual open source enthusiasts held OSS back from the business automation space.

That objection is now falling away, as the event horizon of open source efforts is starting to reach the frontiers of the RPA, IA (intelligent automation) and low-code market spaces. What is causing such rapid growth in contributions to this space, and what impact will the advance of OSS make on automation in the near future?

Shifting work away from proprietary systems

Businesses constantly demand transformative new application functionality – but inevitably, this requires overcoming the inertia of existing proprietary systems, along with deep programming and integration labor. Any company with a history has already accumulated multiple layers of technology for handling business processes and data, from core monolithic systems to SaaS platforms.

The idea of screenware automation is nothing new, but dedicated RPA tools appeared on the scene in the mid-2010s at just the right time. As most companies sought to scale up their agility for designing and executing on business processes at cloud scale, the ability to have ‘extra sets of hands’ to quickly repeat manual work across multiple application interfaces and disparate services became popular.

This first generation of RPA vendors had a key shortcoming – they offered closed systems, so once processes were captured, they could only be run within the vendor’s proprietary work automation servers as well. Furthermore, editing the captured processes to allow dynamic behavior often required ‘ripping off the cover’ and doing difficult customization work – making changing processes even more difficult.

Well-established open source projects like Linux and Kafka and Ansible are great mature projects, but to get involved in improving them now, coding skills and an understanding of internal data structures, system architectures, networking, security and the like would be required. Now open source tooling is starting to bridge the skills gap and bring automation into the fold.

Software testing provides a great entry point for newer participants, because it isn’t about coding, it’s about doing. Testing executes a series of human and machine actions, and validates results. So why not put that concept to real work as a repeatable automation framework? Robot Framework is an interesting open test automation project that planted the seeds for the next generation of automation.

Robot Framework uses the Python language, which makes its resulting code quite human readable. The simplicity of how properties are declared and the abstraction of real work processes as code brings Robocorp’s RPA project down to a skill level that is as easily approachable for new community members, as it is highly productive for experienced developers.