Open source powers businesses around the world, and you can take advantage of this remarkable technology.
Linux and Open Source are everywhere. No matter what industry you serve (manufacturing, data, retail or services sector), open source already plays a role in your company or will play a role in the future.
You may not even realize that open source technology is helping to power and drive your business, but it is. There is simply no way to avoid it. You may have originally started the company using only proprietary software, but those days are long gone. Without open source and Linux, most companies would struggle to keep up with the competition.
So how will Linux and open source technology play an important role in your company's future? Let's find out.
The cloud
It's no secret that Linux and open source software power the cloud . In fact, Linux-based images make up 60% of those found on Azure . That's considerable, especially considering Microsoft is the company behind Azul .
But it's not just Linux images that are being deployed to clouds, it's that Linux and open source are the tools that really make the cloud work. Even Google uses a lot of open source to help power its various platforms. Google even open-sources several tools they create (like TensorFlow). You can check out several open source projects that Google has made available to the public .
Software stacks
Almost every available software stack uses open source software. In fact, finding a software stack that uses only proprietary software is nearly impossible. And given how your company must take advantage of one or more software stacks, it's inevitable that at some point your company will have to use open source software. From the LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) to a frontend stack of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, to a backend stack of Python, Django, NGINX and MySQL, open it as the foundation of almost every stack available.
Development languages
You would be surprised to find out how many development languages are open source. JavaScript, Python, PHP, Swift, R, C++, Go, and Kotlin are often included in the top ten programming languages in use. And of course, all of these languages are open source. So, whether your company plans to build web apps, mobile apps, front-end apps, or backend services, you will use open source.
Containers
Containers are huge these days. It's true that this technology primarily only benefits larger companies, but that doesn't mean that midsize businesses can't also take advantage of portable, scalable, and highly available services and applications deployed in a cluster environment. While you can develop containers on macOS or Windows, you won't deploy them to scale on those platforms. Both the technology for creating, deploying and managing containers is open source, the most used platform for deployment is Linux. Therefore, if your company has any intention of using either Docker or Kubernetes you will need to adopt the open source operating system before doing so.
AI/machine learning
AI and machine learning have both made significant inroads into the business world. And given the breadth of AI/ML use cases, there is almost no way to avoid this technology in your business. Some companies use AI/ML specifically for data purposes (for things like data mining and finding trends in data). Other companies employ AI/ML to add agile development to their software development lifecycle. So, if you want to venture into the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) realm, AI will certainly be a requirement at some point in the development pipeline.
It should come as no surprise that much AI/ML technology (like TensorFlow) is open source. And the development languages best suited for AI/ML (like Python) are also open source.
Big data
If you want to join the exciting world of Big Data , get ready to embrace open source in your business. Some of the most important tools in Big Data are open source, such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, HPCC, Apache Storm, Apache SAMOA and Elastic Search. These tools are crucial for working with large amounts of data. And if you want to work with data lakes and data warehouses, you will once again be dealing with open source technologies.
Big Data will not disappear. Almost every large company across the world relies on these gigantic collections of data. And even some of the tools used to analyze and visualize this data are open source. Software platforms like Grafana, Redash, D3, and Google Charts rely on open source technology.
Conclusion
Open source drives innovation, big business, and much of the technology that users depend on every day. From the innocuous Google Drive to interactive and widely used social media (like Facebook and Twitter), these technology platforms wouldn't be as widely usable without open source software and Linux.
So the big question now is how will Linux and open source play an important role in your company's future?
Source: BairesDev