If your company is serious about competing in a very challenging market scenario, you will have to consider adopting open source technology. The freedoms this will provide will go a long way toward keeping you agile and competitive.
Red Hat State Of Open-Source 2022 Surveytwo important statistics stand out:
- 82% of IT leaders choose to work with open source enterprise vendors.
- 80% of companies expect to increase their use of open source enterprise software for emerging technologies.
These are numbers that cannot be denied. Just ten years ago, these statistics would have been unheard of. However, with more and more companies needing to move to agile methodologies, open source, containerized, cloud-native, and serverless software has not only become exponentially more popular, but has also become a necessity.
But why? What exactly is the true freedom of using open source software and why do so many companies depend on it?
Let's dig deeper and find out.
The open nature of open source
The biggest reason why so many companies rely on open source solutions is their very nature. Open source doesn't just mean being free. In fact, even if most open solutions had a price, companies would be more than willing to pay the price. The reason for this is that it is open.
What does that mean?
Primarily, open source means that code is readily available for download, inspection, modification, and redistribution. The fact that companies can modify the code is a huge selling point.
Consider this: Your company purchases proprietary software only to discover that there are one or two things it can't do or doesn't do well enough. Or maybe you buy that software only to realize that it might be useful for another purpose, only to find that the software license doesn't allow you to use the software outside of its intended purpose.
These limits can be insurmountable obstacles that can not only waste valuable time but also cost you money.
After all, time equals money.
Due to the open nature of open source software, you not only have access to the code, but you can also change it so that it does exactly what you need. You can even use the software outside of its intended function. In other words, it's up to you how, when, where and why you use open source software.
Flexibility beyond imagination
Another freedom that open source offers is flexibility. With open source software, you are not limited to how a piece of software can be used. You are also not limited to what other pieces can be put together to form a completely different set of tools or a full stack application.
Even better, you can mix and match. For example, your company is developing a mobile app that will change the landscape of how users interact with a company. For this you will probably need a database. As you are working with open source, you decide which database to use. Maybe it's MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, ArangoDB or Google Cloud Firestone. Thanks to the adoption of open source technology, the choice is yours. And with open APIs, there's no limit to how creative you can be when connecting these diverse pieces.
You are also not limited to using off-the-shelf software. Yes, with open source software, you can easily plug various tools and solutions, created by other developers, into your stack. And there are already many stacks created that you can base your software on. There are MEAN, MERN, LAMP and Ruby On Rails (to name a few), but you can go further and create your own. The LAMP battery is one of the most used on the planet, but it may not have everything you need. Maybe instead of Apache you want NGINX. Instead of MySQL, you'll want MongoDB. Even better, you may have created a tool for the stack that does something no other team has ever thought of doing.
You could build a stack consisting of:
- Linux
- NGINX
- MongoDB
- Phyton
- X
Where X is the special piece created by your development team that makes it possible to integrate the entire stack into the mobile application you are developing. Since everything else in the stack is open source, your developers should have no problem getting X to work. If this stack consisted of proprietary software, integrating your own piece of the puzzle could be a nightmare.
After you build and integrate X into your stack, consider releasing that component under an open source license so others can benefit from your work. This may seem like a way for your competition to gain an advantage, but giving back is in the spirit of open source. Not only would you be helping another company, but the work they put into X would also be available to you. If that other company improves X in a way that your team hasn't anticipated or seen, that would greatly benefit you too.
During all this time, not a single penny changed hands.
Try this with proprietary software and see how far you get.
You can't spell “freedom” without “free”
If there is one universal truth, it is that every company wants to save money. Companies have not only learned this lesson, but they employ it everywhere they can. Since the vast majority of open source software is free, it makes perfect sense to adopt the technology just to save costs.
The truth is that most companies could run just fine with nothing but open source software. While there is a temptation to use proprietary solutions like Slack, there are open source solutions (like Rocket.chat) that offer similar functionality at no cost.
Or maybe you need an in-house cloud solution. For this, you could deploy Nextcloud.
- Office suite? LibreOffice.
- Ecommerce solution? WordPress and Woocommerce.
- Graphic editor? GIMP.
- Operational system? Linux.
If you have a team with talent and time, they can develop solutions in-house using open source software. For example, your team could clone the LibreOffice repository with the git clone https://git.libreoffice.org/core command. They could then fork LibreOffice and create an office suite specific to their company's needs.
That's a level of freedom you can't have with closed source software.
Containers and the cloud
Container and cloud deployments give every business unprecedented flexibility. Containers make it possible for your company to not only easily deploy full-stack applications, but they also make it easy to scale these deployments up and down as needed.
The cloud has become so prevalent in technology that it's almost hard to imagine living without it. Cloud-native development allows your development teams to create applications that can offload processing, computation, storage, and data sharing to a third-party host, so you don't have to shell out sizable portions of your budget on servers powerful enough to handle the task.
Neither containers nor the cloud would be possible without open source software.
Languages, libraries and frameworks
Finally, when you start researching the languages, libraries, and frameworks available for your projects, you'll soon realize that most of them are released under an open source license. Thanks to this, you have unrestricted access to these tools for free.
Imagine if you had to pay for all the languages, libraries, and frameworks your teams depend on to create the solutions you need. Your budget would quickly run out. Either that or your company would have to stop a large part of its development projects.
Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python and Go are open source languages. Imagine doing what your company needs without them. The same thing goes for frameworks like Django, React and Vue.
Without open source languages, libraries, and frameworks, the world would not enjoy the amount of innovation we see happening. And without the technology that drives innovation, most companies would have difficulty continuing to move forward in what has become an incredibly competitive landscape.
BairesDev promotes open source for a better future
We understand the challenges that come with open source solutions, but we believe in them as a way to foster more innovation and collaboration. That's why we have a special focus on open source with a strategic set of CSR practices. We provide financial support to several open source projects, including Chakra UI, Gitea, JSdelivr, Ajv, and Bulma, among others. We encourage our developers to contribute to open source projects, promoting collaboration and skill growth. Finally, we actively participate in open source communities, attend conferences and events, and support open source initiatives.
Conclusion
Yes, your company could survive on proprietary software alone, but it certainly wouldn't thrive. If you really want to keep up with the competition (or get ahead), your company will have to adopt open source software at multiple levels – from development to end users.
Not only will your business save a lot of money, but it will also be considerably more flexible, which can lead to breakthrough innovations.
