Why is collaboration so fundamental to DevOps and open-source success?

Quick answer: collaboration is why open-source software exists at all — projects like Linux and WordPress run a large share of the internet because hundreds of contributors shared work instead of each solving the same problem alone; without that collaborative model, most of the free infrastructure the internet depends on wouldn't exist.

Sharing is caring, and sharing is key in software development and DevOps. After all, if we didn't share stuff we wouldn't have open-source software, and without open-source software we wouldn't have many great projects. WordPress runs a lot of websites, and the Linux kernel itself runs most of the worldwide web — nearly every server on the internet, if it's not Microsoft, is running Linux. That kernel is open source, and open-source projects are the result of a handful, sometimes hundreds, of developers all contributing to the same source.

Imagine if you had to pay for that — that'd be very expensive. But imagine the value that we get out of it: I'm running a Linux desktop right here, and I get value because it works and allows me to do my job. So without collaboration we wouldn't have open source, and without open source we wouldn't have a lot of things on the internet right now. So let's collaborate.