Shadowing Practice: The Rise Of Open-Source Software - Learn English Speaking with Video
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168 sentences
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Much of the software that powers the world's largest companies, protects our personal data, or encrypts national security information is open to the public.
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Anyone can download the source code behind Facebook's user interface, Google's Android operating system, or even
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Goldman Sachs' data modeling program and use it as a building block for a totally new project.
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What's more, lots of this software is actually developed collaboratively.
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Created and maintained by an army of thousands, from unpaid volunteers to employees at competing tech companies.
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As a kid in a small town in Virginia, I could get connected to the best developers anywhere on earth
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and learn from them and even read the code that they'd written.
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I really wanted to give back.
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And these people were always my heroes.
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So I wanted to participate too.
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And my voice mattered.
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It was just immediately I was hooked.
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This is the collaborative world of open source software, where code is written and shared freely.
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If individuals catch a bug or see an opportunity for improvement,
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they can suggest changes to the code and thereby become a contributor to some of the biggest software projects on Earth.
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But this model hasn't always been the norm.
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At the dawn of the Internet era through the late 1990s, proprietary software proliferated.
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Microsoft even went so far as to call open source un -American and bad for intellectual property rights.
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Software was a finite commodity that people hoarded and wanted to sell as a product.
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Open source software was only developed and maintained by a dedicated few.
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And there was this fringe world,
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there was this academic world who were creating software according to their own rules and sharing it publicly and making it free.
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Certainly dreamed, like wouldn't it be awesome if we could sort of take over the world.
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Now, open source has essentially taken over the world.
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companies in every industry from Walmart to ExxonMobil to Verizon have open sourced their projects.
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Microsoft has completely changed its point of view and is now seen as a leader in the space.
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And in 2016, the U .S government even promised to open source at least 20 % of all its new custom -developed code.
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So whether you know it or not, you are relying on volunteer labor in many cases of thousands of strangers from around the world.
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In the 1970s, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab had a printer that regularly jammed.
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So staff programmer Richard Stallman altered its source code so that when problems arose, it would send a message to everyone in the lab saying,
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go fix the printer.
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When the lab finally got a new printer, Stallman discovered its source code was inaccessible.
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He asked for the code, got refused, got upset, and ultimately quit his job to develop a completely open operating system called GNU in 1983.
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With this, Stallman spearheaded the free software movement from which the open source movement was born.
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It's sort of a very natural way to work together.
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Collectively, if everybody comes and contributes their piece,
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you end up with something that's a lot greater than something that an individual could contribute on their own.
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But throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, proprietary software still dominated.
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And that was a very lucrative way of producing and selling software
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and created an incentive for large technology companies to create a proprietary de facto standard.
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It was against this backdrop that the open source operating system
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Linux was unceremoniously released in 1991.
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It incorporated many elements from Stallman's GNU project, but was mainly used by hobbyists looking for an alternative to Windows or Mac OS.
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Throughout the decade, though, Linux gained momentum as large companies took advantage of its flexibility
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and tweaked the software to their specific needs.
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By the turn of the century, NASA, Dell, and IBM were all using it.
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The platform itself changes nine times an hour.
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10 ,000 lines of code are added to Linux every day.
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About 5 ,000 lines are changed and about 8 ,000 lines are removed.
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It is by far the highest velocity, most effective software development process in the history of computing.
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As Linux grew, other open source projects were also gaining popularity, like the database management system MySQL, the Perl programming language, and the web server Apache.
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But for the layperson at the turn of the century, the rise of these technologies could have gone unnoticed.
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After all, hardly anyone ran
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Linux on their personal computers.
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But then, in 2008, Google released
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Android devices, which run on a modified version of Linux.
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Suddenly, the operating system blew up the smartphone market.
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We are still overwhelmed with the amount of innovation that is happening in that ecosystem of Android.
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Today there are over 2 .5 billion active devices using Android.
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As Google demonstrated, businesses were increasingly relying upon this complex web of open source technologies to build products and platforms quickly.
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And whether they knew it or not, this also meant that they were depending upon the vast open source community to maintain this software.
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The ability for one company to produce the amount of software that's required for any modern technology product or service became overwhelming.
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Today in a modern luxury automobile, there are more lines of software code than in an F -15 fighter jet.
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There's just simply too much software to be written for any single organization to ride it themselves.
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99 % of Fortune 500 companies use open source.
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Every web server is pretty much Linux.
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Most people choose to use open source programming languages.
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It's this like amazing buffet.
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You just come in and take this, this, this, this, this, and you slap together something.
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You can build amazingly powerful products with very little work.
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The sheer increase in volume drove a need amongst developers for a central repository where they could collaborate on these huge projects.
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And in 2008, GitHub provided an answer.
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What GitHub really did for open source is it kind of standardized the way
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that people can contribute to open source projects and interface with them.
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And so that any developer anywhere on earth knew how to contribute to a project on GitHub.
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And that fed this explosion of open source activity.
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Today, GitHub hosts the grand majority of the world's open source software projects.
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And in 2018, Microsoft even acquired GitHub, affirming the tech giant's commitment to open source development.
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We have about 140 million open source or software projects that are on GitHub,
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and over 50 million of those have been added just in the last year.
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So it's growing incredibly fast.
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And the community has expanded far beyond idealistic hobbyists, as major companies are increasingly leading the charge, spearheading the development of open source projects in -house.
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So we see companies like
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Intel, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, all contributing heavily to open source.
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Googlers have been contributing to over 28 ,000 projects in 2018.
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This number includes projects that Google has driven, as well as contributions it's made to projects led by other companies or individuals.
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In the open source world, you have these fierce commercial rivals who collaborate every day together and they haven't signed anything.
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And it's not just software companies.
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ExxonMobil has open sourced its developer toolkit.
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Walmart open sourced its cloud management platform.
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And Goldman Sachs recently open sourced its data modeling program.
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This open source way of working turned out to be better
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because even in a big tech company where you might have 20 or 30 or 50 ,000 developers,
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you can't compete with the 40 million developers that are now on GitHub working on open source every day.
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Put simply, open source development has become the new norm.
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And so I expect to see more and more investment into open source communities and more and more projects,
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as well as companies finding ways to commercially monetize the activity that's collected across all of these different open source communities.
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So how is open source monetized when the product is basically given away for free?
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Basically, the answer lies in selling support services, subscriptions, and or commercial versions of the software.
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Red Hat, founded in 1993, was the first to figure out a successful business model, which relies upon selling support services for its operating system,
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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Anyone can download the software for free.
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But if businesses want technical support and greater security, they'll need to buy a subscription.
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After decades of commercial success, IBM officially acquired
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Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion.
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It was the largest software acquisition in history.
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It's really groundbreaking and it just shows the power and success of open source across the world, across the industries.
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While Red Hat's 100 % open source model has been hard to replicate,
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other companies like database program MongoDB and integration platform MuleSoft rely upon an open core model, meaning the basic features are free,
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but add -ons and other useful elements are proprietary.
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As these companies have racked up multi -billion dollar valuations, there's no doubt that on the enterprise level, there's big money in open source.
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But as for the individual developers, the hobbyists who contribute to and maintain open source projects just for fun,
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their path to profitability is much less clear.
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There are a lot of different models for how people make money in open source.
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One of the models is actually they don't.
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A lot of them are volunteers and they do this in the free time, in the evenings and on the weekends.
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But sometimes these just for fun side projects end up becoming widely used, critical to the internet infrastructure that we generally take for granted.
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Certain projects get so popular and so widely used that, you know, they're in every product.
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They're used by every company.
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And then this result of like, you know, massive
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Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies building their businesses on top of this code that's written by hobbyists for who knows what reason, right?
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As one might imagine, problems can arise
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when critical systems are based on software
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that's maintained by unpaid volunteers with no professional obligation to see to the maintenance of the project.
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This issue came to a head in 2014.
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When the security vulnerability dubbed Heartbleed was found in OpenSSL,
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an open source encryption technology that's used by the majority of web servers to protect users' personal data.
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The flaw has gone undetected for about two years and has exposed millions of usernames, passwords and possibly credit card info as well.
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They left this lock capable of being picked because they didn't write the code quite right.
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And when they looked into it, the OpenSSL team was tiny.
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It was just a few people who were mostly working on donations and their donations had started to dry up.
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And understandably, these incredibly talented programmers had a hard time justifying spending full time on this,
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even though it was one of the most important building blocks of the entire Internet.
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Ultimately, organizations like the Linux Foundation pulled together to provide financial support for OpenSSL, as well as other critical pieces of underfunded open source software.
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But the disaster served as a wake -up call for an industry that still largely relies upon unpaid labor.
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The burden on the maintainer can become quite intense.
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You have sort of all these businesses coming in and saying, like, you know, your code is broken.
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It's preventing me from getting my job done.
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And so you get this, like, almost intense guilt.
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I feel like a lot of maintainers have a guilt.
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Now, companies are taking note and helping to formalize new funding models.
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In 2019, GitHub rolled out their Sponsors program, which allows developers to give and receive recurring donations for their work.
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We already have some people who are making their full living on GitHub Sponsors, so they don't have another job.
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And so that's huge for us.
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And that's really the key number that we are trying to move up.
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For developers like Aboukadije, making a full -time living around open source is indeed the dream.
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I prefer the freedom of being able to just follow my interests wherever they go
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and solve whatever problems I think are interesting.
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I'll never make money from some of the stuff I've worked on,
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but I think I've done a lot of good in the world by working on it.
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It's still early days, but if funding models like GitHub sponsors pay off,
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we may see a new class of software engineers eschewing traditional tech jobs in favor of independent, open -source work.
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Open -source has created so much technological progress, but because it never quite solved this funding problem in those early years,
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I think that we are at a point now where we could lay the groundwork for the next stage of open source.
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This could also mean expanding the cooperative ethos to industries outside of software.
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As the idea of sharing technology and collaborating collectively expands,
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we're moving into open hardware initiatives, data sharing initiatives.
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And that's really going to be the future.
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After all, the success of open source reveals that collaboration and knowledge sharing are more than just feel good buzzwords.
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They're an effective business strategy.
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And if we're going to solve some of the world's biggest problems, many believe that we can't afford to hoard our resources and learnings.
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We have environmental concerns.
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We're trying to understand things like cancer and Alzheimer's.
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These are major collaborative efforts.
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The complexity of building these technologies isn't going down.
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It's only going up.
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We can get that technology out there faster when everybody works together.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Rise Of Open-Source Software”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: source, software, project, companies, code. This video has 95 sentences and 2260 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:43. The speaker talks at a natural 165 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| developer noun | /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/ | A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products. |
| contribute verb | /kənˈtɹɪb.jut/ | To give something that is or becomes part of a larger whole. |
| rely verb | /ɹɪˈlaɪ/ | To trust; to have confidence in; to depend. |
| volunteer noun | /ˌvɑlənˈtɪɹ/ | One who enters into, or offers themselves for, any service of their own free will, especially when done without pay. |
| proprietary adjective | /pɹəˈpɹaɪ.ə.tə.ɹi/ | Of or relating to property or ownership. |
| server noun | /ˈsɝvɚ/ | A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network. |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| expand verb | /ɪkˈspænd/ | To change (something) from a smaller form or size to a larger one; to spread out or lay open. |
| donation noun | /doʊˈneɪʃən/ | A voluntary gift or contribution for a specific cause. |
| printer noun | /ˈpɹɪntɚ/ | One who makes prints. |
| unpaid adjective | /ʌnˈpeɪd/ | Not paid for. |
| collaborate verb | /kəˈlæb.ə.ɹeɪt/ | To work together with others to achieve a common goal. |
| compete verb | /kəmˈpiːt/ | To be in battle or in a rivalry with another for the same thing, position, or reward; to contend. |
| intense adjective | /ɪnˈtɛns/ | Of a characteristic: extreme or very high or strong in degree; severe; also, excessive, towering. |
| enterprise noun | /ˈɛntəˌpɹaɪz/ | A company, business, organization, or other purposeful endeavor. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. |
| work together verb | To be coworkers with someone; to share a workspace with someone. |
| blow up verb | To explode or be destroyed by explosion. |
| dry up verb | To become dry (often of weather); to lose water. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| give back verb | To return, restore (a thing to its original owner or location etc.). |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | hasn't always been · has essentially taken · has completely changed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is actually developed · is written · was only developed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who were · people who are |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 20 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, we're, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thereby /ðɛɹˈbaɪ/, ethos /ˈiθɑs/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: donation /doʊˈneɪʃən/, initiative /ɪˈnɪʃ.ə.tɪv/, subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, luxury /ˈlʌk.ʃə.ɹi/
- Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, proprietary /pɹəˈpɹaɪ.ə.tə.ɹi/, collaborate /kəˈlæb.ə.ɹeɪt/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, initiative /ɪˈnɪʃ.ə.tɪv/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like developer, contribute, rely.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.