Dmitry Nikolaev - stock.adobe.co

Open source is not a trust issue, it’s an innovation issue

Businesses are seeing greater value from open source software, such as greater levels of productivity and reduced operational costs

No project is smooth sailing all the way. So perhaps it was appropriate that the Open Source Summit Europe kicked off amid some of the worst storms in memory, before finishing in clear blue skies and warm autumnal sunshine. 

The Linux Foundation-backed conference saw a raft of product announcements and initiatives, among which was the rolling together of distributed trust projects – including blockchain, ledger, identity and cryptographic efforts – into an LF Foundation Decentralised Trust. 

The Linux Foundation announced general availability of Valkey 8.0, the open source in-memory database project forked from Redis earlier this year, after the eponymous company behind the in-memory database changed its licence.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) donated the OpenSearch project to the Linux Foundation. The cloud giant launched the OpenSearch project in response to Elastic’s licence switch on ElasticSearch back in 2021.

At the same time, the Linux Foundation and its mighty offshoot the Cloud Native Computing Foundation have partnered with Unified Patents to “defend open source software from non-practising entities”, by which they mean patent trolls. 

But while the “ecosystem” looks in rude health, what is happening in the community? Or more to the point, how are businesses really using and benefiting from open source software

The Linux Foundation’s Open source maturity in Europe report paints a robust picture, stating that between 2022 and 2024, “more than half of the respondents each year reported seeing an increased business value from using OSS compared to the previous year”.

For this year, it revealed that just under two-thirds reported a rise in business value from the year before. “This indicates a compounding effect, where the value derived from open source software grows each year. Similarly, the benefits from contributions are also on the rise, with 52% of respondents in recent surveys reporting increased benefits compared to prior years,” said the report. 

Those benefits include increased productivity, cited by 62%, catalysed innovation (61%) and reduced operating costs (60%). Critically, over three-quarters believed open source software to be more secure than closed source software. 

But the research also found that resistant organisational cultures were a brake on open source adoption, particularly “in sectors traditionally resistant to openness, such as finance”.

It added: “Open source is often mistakenly viewed as merely a technical matter, when in fact, it is a cultural change – it is a change maker and needs to be approached in a multidimensional strategy.” 

It’s a culture thing

Achieving that cultural change can be critical when it comes to dealing with an increasingly volatile world, where organisations need to constantly innovate just to survive. 

In a panel on lessons from vertical industries, Mercedes-Benz open source programme lead Wolfgang Gehring said a modern vehicle was a datacentre on wheels, so “innovation and software [mean] open source”, and when it comes to common problems, “you can collaborate with other companies in the industry in open source”. Before open source, he added, “that was much more difficult”.

On the same panel, Karel Rietveld, Open Source Program Office lead at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, said motivations and inhibitions could be slightly different in the public sector, with different regulations and layers of management and compliance to be aware of. Open source might be more cost effective, a big issue for cash-strapped public entities, he added, but there was also the cost of publicly funded time and people to consider. 

But, of course, these are the already converted, and it might be argued that many critical sectors will continue to have an instinctive distrust of open source and be extremely unwilling to embed it in their systems. 

A glib response might be that few companies are not taking advantage of open source in some form anyway. That might be the CEO’s Android phone. Or it could be their use of cloud technologies or services which rely on a cloud native stack predicated on containers and Kubernetes, and open source security tools, and open source-powered developer workflows. 

For all the talk about community, sometimes it’s more base common interest that will drive a company or a sector to use open source. Finance is generally secretive, but increasingly is adopting open source. That’s not necessarily for any utopian ideals. Rather, banks and other financial institutions will have common problems to code for, in the shape of compliance with regulations for example, so it makes sense from an efficiency point of view to find common answers to these problems. 

Gabriele Columbro, who heads up both the Linux Foundation Europe and the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), said if anything, financial services are ahead of “other traditional industries in their adoption and strategic understanding of open source”.

The sector is already highly tech-centric, he said, with banks potentially employing tens of thousands of developers. “And not only the big banks – we have the buy sides, Blackrock, Fidelity, five or six buy side members, and everyone in between. The clearing houses started coming in … so the whole ecosystem is starting to harmonise around open standards and open source.” 

Powering ahead 

The power sector is another “conservative” industry that is increasingly relying on open source as it races to rebuild its systems and infrastructure to meet the climate change challenge. This requires new ways of managing and predicting demand, and that means new tools – fast. As with finance, all operators face these problems, making cooperation easier to contemplate. 

Jonas van den Bogaard, open source lead at Dutch power distribution company Alliander, and a member of the technical advisory council at LF Energy, said the power distribution sector in Holland – likes its counterparts worldwide – is racing to decarbonise the grid and underpin electrification. As well as building out physical capacity, this will require much better tools for management and forecasting. 

“We are actively searching for collaboration and partnerships with industry players – with vendors, both academia and also cross-sector – to bundle resources, knowledge and expertise to realise these new digital integrations,” he said. 

“We’ve seen open source more as one of the means to make this possible, and it has been very successful for building up several capabilities.” 

And power is not the only critical infrastructure that will be relying on open source. 

Whatever works best

Timo Perala heads up Nokia’s open source projects office, having previously worked in standards. Ultimately, he said, its customers want products and services that work – they are not necessarily concerned whether they include open source elements, just as they wouldn’t necessarily care where Nokia sourced components like buts and bolts. 

Moreover, open source collaboration is a form of shared research and development, where everyone needs to solve a problem without necessarily capitalising on the solution. Perala likened it to how companies agree on a handover on a mobile network. “That is something that you just can’t charge for ... it’s a basic requirement, not a competitive advantage,” he said.

It’s hard to think of more conservative industries than power, finance and telecoms. But they are also industries that are facing high levels of disruption and a corresponding need to innovate quickly. 

If they’re building their businesses on open source, the only reason the rest of the world hasn’t is because they’re not being confronted with the same level of potential disruption. Yet. 

As Mercedes’ Gehring told his audience: “Innovation nowadays happens in open source. Innovation in software happens in open source. And you’re either there and you participate, or you’re not. That’s basically it.” 

Read more about open source

  • China’s embrace of open source software has evolved into a powerful force in the global technology landscape, driving innovations in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other areas.
  • Secure software specialist JFrog is working with code development service GitHub to integrate the onboard capabilities of its Software Supply Chain Platform service into GitHub’s platform.

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