Rise of Open Source

In this digital age, technology is proving to be the backbone of the economies and a new revolution can be felt across the globe. New businesses are spinning across the key technologies and the new waves of rising companies are the product of freely available technologies which is also known as open source. Now the questions arise: What is the contribution of open source in businesses and economies? Whether open source technologies are viable enough to be considered as backbone of new unicorns? Can businesses rely on open source technology?

Open source technology is currently supporting technology giants like Google and Facebook and around 70% of new apps. Organizations are increasingly adopting the open source technologies and are taking participation in open source community. According to a survey Ninth Annual future of open source, 78% of organizations are using open source software either fully or partially compared to 42% in 2010 which is nearly doubled in five years. Also around 64% of companies are participating in open source projects compared to 50% last year and it is expected that this number can reach 88% in next 2-3 years. Cloud computing (39%), big data (35%), operating systems (33%), and the Internet of Things (31%) are expected to be impacted most by open source in the next 2-3 years. Red Hat, Ubuntu and Acquia can be traced in the DNA of new start-ups. Even open source databases gained popularity over the period of time. According to a ranking site DB-Engines, out of top 10 databases 6 are open source and top eight relational technologies are all open source. This trend shows how open source is gaining its pace and its universe is expanding sharply.

Linux has contributed heavily in transition phase of information technology that has taken us in the new era which is driven by Big Data, Analytics and Cloud. It has created a strong open ecosystem which has been responsible for the innovation taken place over the period of time which resulted in the expansion of market of Linux, which has surpassed $57 billion in 2014 which is almost doubled in five years.

The quality and reliability of open source software are constantly improving as the developers are continuously working in fixing the defects founded in open source software codes. The Coverity Scan service is helping the developers in finding out bugs in open source codes which is greatly helpful in correcting those bugs and making those codes more reliable and secured to be used by anyone on this planet. Since 2006, the Coverity Scan service has helped developers finding and fixing more than 240,000 defects. In 2014 alone, developers fixed nearly 152,000 defects—more than the total number of defects found from 2006-2013.  Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of code) of open source code and commercial code has continued to improve since 2013. Open source code defect density improved from 0.66 in 2013 to 0.61 in 2014, while commercial code defect density improved from 0.77 to 0.76.

If we talk about developing markets like African and Asian countries, licensing fees are still a major challenge and open source is the key solution for this problem. Some companies are also coming forward in open sourcing their important codes. Safaricom which is an M-Pesa’s founding organisation announced that it will open its API (application programming interfaces)to developers in 2015. Similarly Orange in West Africa has opened up its API and recently Intel has released the speech system which has made for Stephen Hawkins as open source. Even NASA in collaboration with Rackspace has created an open source cloud computing platform OpenStack. The well known example of open source API is Android which already have thousands of apps and due to which Android have five billion API calls per day where one app asks another to do something. 

Open Source system is playing a major role in creating new winners in technology based business community. We can see a radical shift in technology business model as previous giants like Blackberry and Nokia can be seen left behind in technology innovation and upgradation race while other businesses especially start-ups which are gradually aligning with cloud and open source technologies are proving to be the new winners. In coming time Billions of people will be connected by internet permanently and internet of things (IOT) will be responsible for make people smarter, open source software will help this trend to flourish and will allow anyone on this planet to create devices and applications for the interconnected world.