Max Tkach, technical leader of cloud services and operations at Mercadolibre, an online marketplace, discusses how his company makes the most of open source.

CBR: How important is open source to your company?

Max: MercadoLibre is based almost entirely on open source, and it has proved to be a very solid foundation for the company. We are constantly looking into new open source projects, both on the software plane and hardware planes, to continue innovating and evolving our technologies and products for our end users.

CBR: What are its merits compared to closed source?

Max: In our case, the main advantages are that we have no strings attached to any vendor, and that we are able to view and hack the code at will. This is of utmost importance in our business, because we are able to suit the software to what the company needs to keep it growing.

CBR: Are there any communities built around open source you admire?

Max: We love the open source philosophy and all the communities that support it, not just on the technology field. In our case we particularly admire projects like Codership, GNU, Linux and OpenStack, which are in the very foundation of what we do at MercadoLibre.

CBR: What future projects are you considering using open source for?

Max: We have several projects in development that can’t be disclosed, but projects that we are using (or closely following) include: Cassandra, Spark, Mesos, and Docker, with a lot more coming in the near future.

CBR: How would you rate the future prospects of open source?

Max: I believe the open source philosophy has come to stay for a very long time (if not forever), so the future of it in general looks amazing. It’s much more than just a trend, and it continues to inspire new talent, ideas and projects.

Regarding technology this will continue to strive and flourish. First it was the software, now it is the hardware, and this will continue. The sum of small efforts makes better, modular, efficient, re-usable knowledge and experiences for the benefit of everyone, and open for everyone to continue improving it.