Media Query Source: Part 10
The responses I provided to a media outlet on January 30, 2018:
Media: What is likely to happen with open source in the coming years? This coming week we'll be celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Open Source, which is officially celebrated on February 3rd. It has come a long way in 20 years, what might happen in the future? Looking for contributions from anyone in the industry who works or watches open source.
Gfesser: I've been an advocate of open source software for about 10 years, having developed numerous applications which make use of open source libraries and frameworks during this time period, as well as having contributed to the open source community with respect to two open source software products in particular, including personal involvement in the market validation process for one of these that was recently recognized by Gartner.
One reminder that I've needed to provide to some of my clients over the years is that open source software really isn't about the aspect of its being free. It's about access to the underlying code. Prior to the availability of open source software, developers were dependent on commercial firms to resolve bugs and add features, even if they owned the applicable licenses for the software they used. And at the time, even free software wasn't necessarily open source.
Access to code also implies that it can be built and deployed without requiring the procurement of licenses. So not only can developers modify the code or submit requests to modify the code with respect to specific areas of the code base, it can also be built and deployed in order that developers can start working with it even whilst in the midst of license procurement for commercial variations of it, in the case this is the direction in which developers (or their employers) wish to go.
Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about such commercialized open source, with a focus on an open source relational database product called MySQL that had just been acquired by Sun (the product was since inherited by Oracle as a result of its purchase of the company). An exchange between one of the MySQL co-founders and one of the VPs at Sun who later inherited the product was illustrative of the openness that the co-founder provided about MySQL relative to the VP about it not being ready for release. Typically bundled with open source software is also the prevalence of open team communication, and one of the responsibilities of architects who adopt such software is to keep tabs on such communication, especially as it relates to releases and release roadmaps.
With respect to the future of open source in general, the most likely scenario is that the prevalence of open source will continue to increase, with commercialized open source likely increasing at a faster rate due to the monetization that it provides. More and more commercial software products are being built around key open source components, providing expanded or more robust functionality as differentiators, because of the quality and adoption rates provided by the underlying code base.
It must be remembered that when thinking about the future of software, strong communities of developers and other users who have grown around software products over time have a reinforcing effect on the quality of the software, due to the inherent feedback loops that these communities provide, and such feedback is oftentimes far greater with open source software due to the larger user bases that provide open discussion outside the limits typically associated with closed source software.
Three areas of open source software products which are especially likely to continue to grow in coming years are databases, data analytics (in the broad sense), and DevOps. Witness the long-time dominance of Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server give way to the upward trajectory of open source database products such as MongoDB and PostgreSQL (upon which other database products have been built, due to its maturity), and the relatively recent decision by Microsoft to provide a Linux implementation of its flagship database (due to the dominance of Linux in the enterprise relative to Windows, which has only increased because of Docker).
Additionally, commercial heavyweights are increasingly taking on features provided by open source competitors in order to remain relevant (or at least minimize loss of market share). In the data analytics space, Python libraries dominate machine learning and R libraries dominate exploratory statistics. And the greater the prevalency of these libraries in the universities, the greater the adoption rates will be in industry relative to commercial competitors such as SAS. In the DevOps space, I recall my colleagues and I being relatively early adopters of Hudson, which was later forked to form Jenkins that many of us continue to use along with Docker and all of the other containerization technologies provided in this space, all of which are dominated by open source.
In discussing open source with a colleague not so long ago, I recall their questioning whether open source software really fulfills enterprise level needs. To be clear, as is the case with commercial software, not all open source software has the same level of maturity and robustness, and a variety of factors needs to be considered as part of the product selection process. But enterprise level needs arguably cannot be universally defined for anything other than commodity solutions, and in coming years firms will need to come to this realization. Additionally, governance of both open source software adoption and usage will need to continue to adapt in order that firms will be able to survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.