Sentry’s CEO, Milin Desai, outlines how companies that digitally transform themselves ship quality customer experiences frequently.
Open-source software has fueled innovation for decades, providing the building blocks for the internet and the modern cloud. Today, I believe that we’re entering a new era in which every company that depends on software—both vendors and customers—will need to be open-source aligned (in other words, contribute in time, money and software back to the community) to succeed.
There are two main drivers of this. On the customer side, enterprises are increasingly turning to open-source software and products to accelerate development, citing factors like faster time to market, no vendor lock-ins and lower acquisition costs. On the supplier side, a new generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies are meeting this demand by creating thriving businesses built around open-source software in the cloud.
At a high level, this is all being driven by a period of intense innovation in open-source software to meet the needs of data professionals and software developers. The burgeoning AI industry is being powered by open-source frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch and Auto-GPT, and developers are adopting new open-source tools and frameworks like Astro and htmx. All of this innovation makes now a unique moment in open-source history.
No wonder, then, that 80% of organizations increased their use of open-source software last year. GitHub researchers have said that more than 90% of the Fortune 100 use its service to host open-source code, and GitHub now has more than 94 million developers on its platform.
This increased reliance on open source puts an onus on the whole industry to invest in projects and contributors, which often can’t meet the level of investment required for critical areas like security, patching and distribution. Open-source projects aren’t magically self-sustaining, and failing to invest in them could kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs for all of us.
Customers Demand Open Source And Open Standards
Almost every company is now a software company, and many enterprises are using open-source software extensively in their own operations to build their products and services. Walmart was an early pioneer in aligning its business around open source, but many others have followed. In August 2023, Porsche doubled down on its commitment to open source, citing its ability to “shorten development cycles, reduce costs, promote innovation and talent, and improve software quality.” JP Morgan Chase, Spotify and many others are pursuing a similar strategy.
These companies increasingly want their vendors to be open source, too. That doesn’t mean every software company will be open source—although many will—but they must at least be open-source aligned.
What do we mean by that? Microsoft is one of the original examples—despite selling proprietary software, it made open source central to its cloud strategy, acquired GitHub and now works hard to support open-source projects. Apple is another exponent—the company made its Swift programming language open source because it recognized the appeal it would have to developers and the value of community innovation. Companies that are open-source aligned invest in the open-source technologies that support their business and wherever possible offer free or open-source versions of their products, even if only on a trial basis.
Evolving Models For Open-Source-Aligned Software Companies
For a long time, Red Hat was thought of as the last successful open-source company. It took a while for a new business model to emerge, but the growth of the cloud has spawned a new generation of successful companies like Confluent, MongoDB and GitHub that provide managed services built on top of open-source software.
Increasingly, we’re seeing the model of offering this software as a managed service. This model allows for commercialization beyond maintenance fees and for delivering more services to the customers (some being proprietary). However, due to open-source alignment, customers continue to have the option to run it for free themselves (or pay for maintenance). This untethers them from a vendor or a model based on their business needs.
I believe strongly in the value of open-source alignment. My company recently acquired Codecov, which helps developers ensure they have sufficient software testing in place to ensure code quality. It used to be closed-source software, but last month, we chose to make this product source publicly available on GitHub and eventually open source. Our philosophy is to democratize the usage of software for everyone by offering an option to use it locally for free (no strings attached) while also being aligned to make the building block available to the community to continue to enable sharing and innovation.
It’s Critical That We All Play Our Part
The increased reliance on open-source software means that every company must do its part to support the open-source ecosystem we all depend on. This can be done in a variety of ways:
• Donate cash to contributors and projects that are important to your business.
• Donate free software and services to help support community-led open-source projects.
• Give your developers paid time to work on projects.
Last year, my company donated the equivalent of $2,000 for each of the approximately 130 developers at Sentry to open-source projects, and we’re on track to nearly double that figure this year. We also donate in the form of software and services. And we’re not alone. Companies like Indeed, Spotify and Bloomberg have all made generous and material contributions to open-source projects.
But collectively, the industry isn’t doing enough. I believe that open source is now at the heart of modern innovation and that every company must do its part to support open-source software. We’re in a new era in which open source will increasingly be the default for new SaaS services and in which enterprises depend on open source to drive innovation internally. If we all do our part to give back, we can enjoy the fruits of this for many years to come.
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