GlobalOpen Source SoftwareMarket 2019 by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2024is a comprehensive study on the global market which offers market size and share of each separate segment in the market. The report provides a complete report on changing market trends in the globalOpen Source Softwaremarket. The report offers a reliable overview of this business by explaining a modest growth rate over the forecast time frame from 2019 to 2024. The report then involves classified segmentation of market covering product type, application, players, and regions. The estimates from the previous years for each segment and sub-segments have been given and annual forecasts and estimations from the years 2019 to 2024 have been provided.

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An Overall Outlook of The Market That Helps In Picking Up Essential Data

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Global Open Source Software Market 2019-2024 Business Insights and Sustainable Growth in Respective Industry - NJ MMA News

Microsoft may have missed the mobile race and traditionally worked in a closed ecosystem, but one revolution which it will certainly not miss out on is the Cloud that is gaining ground in India and around the world.

Satya Nadella, the third CEO of Microsoft who is credited with changing the direction of the company with a revised mission statement, wants to do exactly that. The companys new mission statement reads: Empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft is open to working with companies and technologies with which it competes.

Currently, around 50 per cent of Microsofts India revenues comes from its cloud computing infrastructure and services, which were under 20 per cent just three to four years back. However, under Nadellas leadership, Microsoft aspires to be one of the forerunners in the cloud computing business, taking on rivals AWS, IBM and Google, say analysts.

Microsoft Azure is the Swiss Army Knife of Cloud and not just a knife and is poised to be one of the forerunners of the Cloud wars that will play out in 2020-21. It is a multi-purpose cloud that can cater to the needs of large enterprises, the developer community and the digital-first economy of new age start-ups, says Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst of Greyhound Research.

He further said, Microsoft has forged deep partnerships with Reliance Jio; it is expanding its engagement with new-age start-ups like Myntra, Ola, InMobi; is investing heavily in B2B start-ups by powering them with Azure and working closely with the Government to be empanelled as a priority partner for cloud. It also has Azure ARC as its hybrid, multi-cloud platform.

At the Future Decoded Tech Summit in Bengaluru on Tuesday, Nadella said developers must dream about creating a broad cross-sectoral impact in the Indian economy in every sector including retail, healthcare, agri-tech. He said one of the most important responsibilities of the 4.2-million strong developer community in India one of the largest communities in the world must be to create a more inclusive world by building trust into technology, around privacy and AI models that are deployed, and core cyber security of assets and customers data.

We have 57 data centre regions around the world; we have three regions in India. We will build the infrastructure for openness, so that every layer of the tech stack should meet the real world needs. As we are expanding around the world with all these regions, that means we are also maintaining all the data sovereignty/residency laws. If a start-up developer wants to build an app and reach the world, there cant be a better time than now. We are compliant with all the regulations in the world, said Nadella.

An analyst tracking Microsoft said Nadella is transforming Microsoft from a traditional on-premise software company to a cloud computing services company and has opened up the company to open source software/technologies; forged partnerships with other organisations and made significant investments in SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service).

More:
This time, Microsoft will ensure Cloud is not just a pie in the sky - BusinessLine

On January 14, Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 7 closing the chapter on what was one of the most popular Operating Systems in the world. Even though Windows 7 has reached the end-of-life, the OS is still used by millions around the world.

Ever since Microsoft decided to end the support for Windows 7, several groups have been asking the company to release the source code of Windows 7 to allow to independent developers to work and provide support to the existing users. A couple of weeks back, we reported about an online petition demanding Microsoft open-source Windows 7. The petition was penned by Greg Farough, Campaigns Manager at the Free Software Foundation. The petition gained a lot of traction from Windows 7 fans and it had more than 13,000 signatures. Now that the petition has closed, Free Software Foundation has sent the signatures along with an empty hard drive. The foundation wants Microsoft to copy the source code of Windows 7 along with the license notice on to the drive and send it back. Not only that, but the foundation has also offered Microsoft to help with the transfer of the code.

This afternoon we will be mailing an upcycled hard drive along with the signatures to Microsofts corporate offices. Its as easy as copying the source code, giving it a license notice, and mailing it back to us. As the author of the most popular free software license in the world, were ready to give them all of the help we can. All they have to do is ask.

Free Software Foundation

While honouring the request would be a great opportunity for Microsoft to show how much they care about open source, we dont expect Microsoft to respond. Microsoft has been selling Windows 7 ESU to organizations and the company is making decent money from it.

We want them to show exactly how much love they have for the open source software they mention in their advertising. If they really do love free software and were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt they have the opportunity to show it to the world. We hope theyre not just capitalizing on the free software development model in the most superficial and exploitative way possible: by using it as a marketing tool to fool us into thinking that they care about our freedom.

Together, weve stood up for our principles. They can reject us, or ignore us, but what they cannot do is stop us. Well go on campaigning, until all of us are free.

Free Software Foundation

Moreover, Microsoft still uses pieces of Windows 7 codes on Windows 10 so it will be a bit risky for the company to reveal the source code of those components.

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Free Software Foundation sends hard drive to Microsoft to get Windows 7 source code - MSPoweruser

In recent years, exponential growth in the volume of data and the speed of data integration and management processes has unleashed an explosion of innovation, enabling companies to deliver goods and services that are increasingly responsive, customized and sophisticated in an ever-evolving digital economy.

This kind of data movement would be impossible without APIs application programming interfaces. APIs, forms of modern middleware that plug into various data sources and software services to pipe information to the desired destination, are a critical part of the plumbing of the digital economy. Many of the conveniences of our digitally connected, modern lives like using Amazons Alexa to play music over your home speakers from your Spotify account, or asking your cars navigation system to find a less congested route recommended by Google Maps would be impossible without the APIs that connect companies with their partners, vendors and customers. Indeed, it would not be much of a stretch to say that under the hood, APIs are the engine powering the digital economy.

Kong, the cloud connectivity company with the worlds premier microservices API gateway, is at the head of the pack of a new generation of companies that have emerged in recent years to help organizations optimize their use of APIs. If APIs are the engine behind the digital economy, API gateways are the control panels that determine what goes in and out of this network. Like a smart grid for the cloud, it ensures the flow of data is stable and secure, even at a massive scale. No surprise that API gateways are among the most popular open source technologies, according to new research from Kong/Vanson Bourne.

Advanced API gateways are capable not only of moving data between organizations (e.g., connecting Alexa to Spotify), but also of managing the constant flow of business-critical information within individual companies in a smart way, delivering automated, faster and reliable connectivity among APIs and humans. Demand for this capability is growing rapidly as organizations replace rigid, legacy IT infrastructure (called monolithic) with the more dynamic type of information architecture known as microservices, which leverages APIs to connect discrete software programs and data sources. In this way, microservices API gateways work much like the operating system of a car coordinating the functions of separate but related systems like the transmission, axle and fuel tank in order to keep the engine running and the car moving in the right direction.

Marco Palladino and Augusto Marietti

Led by co-founders Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino, Kongs mission is to make the digital world reliable. The companys end-to-end platform powers trillions of API transactions for leading organizations around the globe, including AppDynamics, Cargill, Just Eat, Santander, SoulCycle, WeWork and Yahoo! Japan. These companies and many others (Kongs open source software has been downloaded more than 100 million times) use Kong to accelerate the construction of smart connections between hundreds of software services and data sources, reduce latency and downtime, automate workflows, improve data governance and security, and monitor the traffic running through all of the companys APIs.

Were building the nervous system of the cloud to power all of the enterprises in the world, explains Marietti. In this analogy, he says, Kong is the brain and the spine. We want to be the one intelligent broker that can request and respond to data, moving all that information in and out of the company, both within and between teams. As a microservices API gateway, Kong is not only the brain and spine of an organization, but also its peripheral nervous system connecting and coordinating the organizations multitude of internal functions and operations, thus supporting the limbs and organs of the business.

EVOLUTION FROM MASHAPE TO KONG

Kongs impressive journey which has seen it grow and evolve rapidly, turn a profit, and raise $71 million to-date from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, Index Ventures, and Jeff Bezos has been ten years in the making. Marietti and Palladino founded the company in 2009 as Mashape, an API marketplace that provided tens of thousands of ready-made APIs for the developer community to build into their own IT infrastructure. In 2015, the co-founders launched Kong as an open source project and in 2017 decided to shift the companys focus completely to Kong after they saw the huge opportunity and demand for the service and thus, the company was reborn as Kong.

Weve changed our execution over the years, but the vision has stayed the same, says Marietti. We knew that there would be a massive explosion in APIs, software and services as companies moved to the cloud, and that every company in the world would need a simple, secure API layer to manage and move all that data. We were ahead of the market when we made the bet that this would be the future of software communications.

Devdutt Yellukar is a General Partner at CRV and a lead investor from Kongs earliest days, supporting the company through its most recent $43 million Series C fundraising round in March 2019. Yellukar agrees that Marietti and Palladinos early recognition of this transformational shift, and their quick steps to capitalize on it, have been critical to the companys success. Kong timed it perfectly, explains Yellukar. Every company in the world is becoming digital, but to provide digital services, they need APIs that allow their machines to talk to other companies machines. And on both ends of those conversations, theres going to be a product like Kong. You can see that the market opportunity is incredibly large.

As any entrepreneur would agree, however, timing is not enough success hinges on the details of execution. In this respect, Kong has also excelled and differentiated itself in the marketplace through two very important strategic decisions: the choice to open source its platform and to expand into API development.

OPEN SOURCE AS SELLING POINT AND GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY

Although open sourcing software in other words, making the code for building software publicly accessible for anyone to copy and adapt was once seen by some as purely academic or even altruistic, today open source is increasingly regarded as a must-have feature by customers, and as a compelling go-to-market strategy by entrepreneurs. Kong was born first and foremost as an open source company, and that crucial early decision has powered its rapid adoption by marquee customers.

For Kong customer AppDynamics, Kongs status as an open source provider was a crucial selling point, with this level of transparency increasing their trust in the underlying technology and giving them greater confidence to deeply integrate Kongs tools throughout the organization. I frankly wouldnt even consider buying a closed source API gateway, the tasks are just too critical, says AppDynamics Senior Director Ty Amell. API gateways are fairly sticky, so it is important that those types of platforms have an open sourced component.

Open sourcing its product is also an important part of Kongs go-to-market strategy, lending itself to effortless adoption by developers, who then serve as product advocates within their organizations and push for paid enterprise services, creating a flywheel.

Because it was open sourced, people could just download it and start to appreciate how scalable and secure it was, and how neat and clean the interfaces were, Yellukar says. When the team open sourced Kong, there was a giant sucking sound in the market for this. Thats what happens with successful open source companies theres humongous love for this type of technology from the community, and that allows you to build the company.

EVOLUTION FROM API GATEWAY TO END-TO-END API AND SERVICE LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Kongs latest strategic move that is already gaining promising traction is its recent entry into the lifecycle management of APIs and new role in the development of APIs from the ground up. Kongs $43 million Series C round helped finance the companys acquisition of Insomnia, an API testing platform. Insomnia in turn provided the foundation for Kong Studio, a suite of software for developers to design and collaborate on APIs.

AppDynamics Amell says that Kongs entry into the API development space was another key selling point that elevated the service beyond just an API gateway and into a full lifecycle management platform capable of solving multiple pain points for APIs along the path from creation to testing to management. We had a conversation with Kong early on about where they were going with lifecycle management. If I project out to the future, I think API gateways become part of lifecycle management, so that you can design, test, and manage all from the same platform.

This strategy is also compelling for Kong because providing developers with the tools and raw materials for building APIs will add greater value to customers. We realized that by offering a way to design, build, and test services, we can further streamline processes for our customers and enable them to be more productive, says Marietti. Once enterprises have done that, then they can use Kongs API gateway to manage these services. Were building a full lifecycle platform that helps you end-to-end, like the circle of life youre born, you build, design, test, and manage. Eventually you retire some functions you dont need anymore, and then you start all over again.

RIDING THE TAILWINDS

While Kong is already transforming the industry, Marietti says the company is just scratching the surface and that the pace of innovation will only continue to accelerate from here on out. Investments in artificial intelligence will be a key driver of this continued innovation as we are now seeing with Kong Brain, the companys first major step to automate API management and transform what is effectively a system of dumb pipes into a true nervous system. The company continues to drive open source innovation as well, launching its latest open source project, Kuma, this past September.

Underneath it all, the fundamental shift of enterprises moving into the cloud and putting more and more data in motion, both within and between organizations, is driving Kongs success. Backed by these promising tailwinds, its hard to put an upper bound on Kongs future prospects for growth.

Companies are going to be migrating to the cloud and facing the challenge of how to move more and more data for the next 100 years, says Marietti. Theres a long way to go, and I think companies are only 1% of the way there. Theres a real need, and thats how Kong is growing so quickly the market is pulling it.

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The Digital Economy Is The API Economy And Kong Is King - Forbes

Three years ago I quit my job at JP Morgan doing algorithmic trading in order to launch a technology startup,Concurnas- to create a new programming language!

What does an algorithmic trader do?

Algorithmic trading can mean many things and in my career at least it has covered high frequency sub millisecond foreign exchange market making systems to multi-second complex derivative pricing systems to multi-hour trading systems for trading orders of large volume.

Whereas the media often likes to portray computerized trading as something threatening, at least in my experience I found it to be something which helped facilitate the process of trading at scale. Ithas a demonstratively positive effect in reducing the cost of trading and improving efficiency and is an area full of enthusiastic people who like solving interesting complex problems and who overall want to do the right thing.

What makes a good algorithmic trader?

To start in algorithmic trading, youmust be able to code. Today most graduates entering the trading world can program (or at least have a working knowledge of programming) in languages such as Python. These days the idea of a coder who can trade, or a trader who can code is no longer seen as a peculiarity. Anunderstanding of applied mathematics and statistics is also highly beneficial.

Contrary to the popular stereotype that algorithmic trading is only for nerds, I found that really to succeed one needed to be a people person, for when we were launching new products there would be days when I'd be having one to one's with upwards of 40+ people across sales, trading, technology, compliance, market risk, marketing, legal, quantitative research, product etc.

Algorithmic trading jobs are great!

Algorithmic trading is a great area to work. In addition to it being an intellectual job in terms of mathematically modeling trading ideas and then coding them up for monetization it's an incredibly transformative area to work with lots of exposure to some very senior people in the bank. This of course opens up lots of avenues for personal career progression. In fact it was not uncommon for people to make it to MD before their 35th birthday.

In many ways I found the work in algorithmic trading to be a condensed version of the engineering and organizational challenges faced by the wider economy, a microcosm of the problems the real world faces every day from an engineering, mathematical and business process perspective except at breathtaking speed with little tolerance for error! Algo trading is areally exciting and challenging job.

So why did I leave?

This all sounds awesome right!? So how come I quit to start my own company?

The short of it is that, like many startup founders, although I really loved my job I just found something more interesting to do. People talk about how banks are becoming more like technology companies and while that is true in terms of reliance upon technology (the modern trading desk simply cannot operate without some form of automated trading), in terms of direct impact banks are nowhere near tech companies. - If you work on something like Google search you effectively have billions of customers, whereas in banks even for the most prestigious of roles you may have a few thousand customers at best.

If you want to do technical work, and enable your work to have that direct global impact, you either have to work for a large tech company or start your own!

What happened for me was that while I was sitting in the bank, I saw that the engineering problems which we were solving on a day to day basis were mostly centered around building reliable scalable high performance distributed concurrent systems - which along with computer graphics and AI is one of the most complex areas aspects of software engineering to get right. When I looked at these problems I started to see patterns and ways in which the solutions applied could be generalized, and I thought to myself, "Hey, there's a product here, and it would be beneficial for banks and the wider economy to have access to it". And so Concurnas as a programming language was born.

What does my Concurnas programming language do?

Concurnas is a highlevel programming language, and this makes it easy to use.

When you're working ona trading desk there is so much going on that you quickly learn that if you are to get anything done you must be incredibly focused with your time (unless you like working till 10pm and all weekend). Personally, I'd often enter a Zen-like state when I was trying to model and code. What really helped in that situation was using so called high level programming languages such as Python.

High level programming languages don't require you to write as much code as languages such as C and C++ in order to get the same amount of work done. The code is also more directed to solving business problems as opposed to technical problems, which means it's easier for a person who doesn't focus exclusively on coding in say market risk or compliance, to understand what somecode is doing. I learned very early on in my algorithmic trading career that it's best to make the job of people in market risk and compliance easy. -The quicker they can sign off on your work, the quicker you can get to market.

For this reason Concurnas has been engineered to be an easy to program language, just like Python - but better.

Concurnas runs on Java and is open source

Python is a great language, but it can beslow. This is why you often find that trading systems are written in the likes of C/C++ or more recently Java.

In addition to its incredible performance, Java in particular has a wealth of open source software available for it which anyone can use for free.

Concurnas runs on Java - this way it offers the incredible performance of Java and use of all the existing free Java based software that's available. Concurnas also offers support for the 'domain specific languages' (DSLs) which inevitably get built into trading systems as developers invent their own nomenclature for describing a trading problem. This is unusual - few programming languages offer any DSL support.

Lastly,Concurnas is open source. I'm often asked why I give it away for free and the reason is that, throughout my career I, and the companies I've worked for, have benefited from open source software, in fact much of the world's software relies upon open source, and so this is my way of giving back.

As a company, Concurnas Ltd offerscommercial supportfor the Concurnas programming language as well astechnology consultingservices for banks, hedge funds and the wider economy. I hope you benefit from it!

Photo byWarren WongonUnsplash

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment youd like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will unless its offensive or libelous (in which case it wont.)

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What an algorithmic trader does and why I quit to create my own programming language - eFinancialCareers

Red Hat has been at the forefront of the global open source discussion, fighting for software freedom in the U.S Supreme Court, and offering free tech products for cloud infrastructure, automation, AI, and much more. After conducting research and interviewing IT leaders from around the world, Red Hat released a report examining the state of enterprise open source in 2020.

950 IT leaders, unaware that Red Hat was the research sponsor, were surveyed about their practices and opinions on enterprise open source software.

Notably, 95% of IT leaders agree that enterprise open source software is important.

Lets review some of the statistics revealed in Red Hats study.

SEE ALSO: Leading your team of young developers: 5 tips for helping them grow within their careers

With the rise of open source software used for both private programming and in the enterprise, proprietary software is declining. In two years, usage of proprietary software has dropped across the board and IT decision-makers expect that this trend will continue in the next two years.

In 2020, just 42% of software used in the enterprise is proprietary, compared to 55% in 2019. IT-leaders anticipate that in two years, this number will decrease even further.

According to the report:

Maybe it doesnt surprise you that proprietary software is losing favorexpensive and inflexible proprietary software licenses result in high capital expenditures (CapEx) and vendor lock-in. However, the rate at which organizations are abandoning proprietary software is notable, especially given how slowly change usually comes to the enterprise software space. Remarkably, enterprise open source is expected to rise from 36% to 44% over the next two years.

The benefits of using open source software seem obvious, namely that they are, of course, freely available. However, its lack of a price tag isnt the main thing that IT leaders love.

According to the survey, respondents believe that higher-quality software is the number one benefit of enterprise open source. FOSS software is often better than proprietary options, with better security, cloud-native technologies, and cutting edge solutions.

What important areas are businesses using FOSS for in 2020?

In particular, teams are using open source software to modernize their infrastructure, in application development, and in DevOps.

Despite the rise in usage and amount of solutions it provides, there are still some barriers and concerns about using open source code in the enterprise. While IT leaders agree that innovative companies turn to FOSS, some perceived concerns remain.

Even though security was listed as a top benefit, 38% of respondents cite that code security is a top barrier to using enterprise open source solutions and technologies.

SEE ALSO: DevOps report card: Security must be part of the software delivery cycle

What does the future hold for FOSS? If the past is in any indication, it will continue to maintain its hold. Back in 2008, Linus Torvalds said in an interview with InformationWeek:

I think that Open Source can do better, and Im willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but its not a crusade its just a superior way of working together and generating code. Its superior because its a lot more fun and because it makes cooperation much easier (no silly NDAs or artificial barriers to innovation like in a proprietary setting), and I think Open Source is the right thing to do the same way I believe science is better than alchemy.

Read the full report from Red Hat for all of the insights and commentary.

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Open source growing within innovative companies - JAXenter

The Linux Foundation is addressing structural and security complexities in todays modern software supply chains with the release of the Vulnerabilities in the Core, a preliminary report and census II of open-source software.

The report was put together by the Linux Foundations Core Infrastructure Initiative and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

RELATED CONTENT:Report: The benefits of open-source software go beyond costThe realities of running an open-source community

The Census II report addresses some of the most important questions facing us as we try to understand the complexity and interdependence among open source software packages and components in the global supply chain, said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation. The report begins to give us an inventory of the most important shared software and potential vulnerabilities and is the first step to understand more about these projects so that we can create tools and standards that results in trust and transparency in software.

Based on the foundation and labs analysis, the team found the following ten packages as the most used free and open-source software packages.

The report also details the most commonly used non-JavaScript packages, which includes:

Based on these packages, the researchers were able to determine some common problems. For instance, they found the naming schema for software components were unique, individual and inconsistent. The effort required to untangle and merge these datasets slowed progress on the current project significantly. Despite the considerable effort that went into creating the framework to produce these initial results for Census II, the challenge of applying it to other data sets with even more varied formats and naming standards still remains, the report stated.

Open source is an undeniable and critical part of todays economy, providing the underpinnings for most of our global commerce. Hundreds of thousands of open source software packages are in production applications throughout the supply chain, so understanding what we need to be assessing for vulnerabilities is the first step for ensuring long-term security and sustainability of open source software, said Zemlin.

Additionally, there is an increasing importance of individual developer account security. A majority of top packages were found to be hosted under individual accounts, which can mean they are more vulnerable to attack.

Lastly, the researchers found the persistence of legacy software in the open source space. According to them, this can lead to compatibility problems, and financial and time-related costs.

FOSS was long seen as the domain of hobbyists and tinkerers. However, it has now become an integral component of the modern economy and is a fundamental building block of everyday technologies like smart phones, cars, the Internet of Things, and numerous pieces of critical infrastructure, said Frank Nagle, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-director of the Census II project. Understanding which components are most widely used and most vulnerable will allow us to help ensure the continued health of the ecosystem and the digital economy.

In order to determine the top packages and projects, the foundation worked with software composition analysis and app security companies like Snyk and Synopsys.

Considering the ubiquity of open source software and the essential role it plays in the technology powering our world, it is more important than ever that we take a collaborative approach to maintain the long term health of the most foundational open source components, said Tim Mackey, principal security strategist for the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center. Identifying the most pervasive FOSS components in commercial software ecosystems, combined with a clear understanding of both their security posture and the communities who maintain them, is a critical first step. Beyond that, commercial organizations can do their part by conducting internal reviews of their open source usage and actively engaging with the appropriate open source communities to ensure the security and longevity of the components they depend on.

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The Linux Foundation reveals the most commonly used open-source software components - SDTimes.com

This is a guest post for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider written by Ali Ghodsi in his capacity as co-founder and CEO at data science, big data processing and machine learning company Databricks.

Databricks was founded by the creators of Apache Spark. The company was founded to provide an alternative to the MapReduce system and provides a just-in-time cloud-based platform for big data processing clients.

The companys technology is used by developers, data scientists and analysts to help users integrate the fields of data science, engineering and the business behind them across the machine learning lifecycle.

Ghodsi writes as follows

The open source community around the world is continuing to grow. According to an Octoverse report, over 1.3 million first time contributors joined the open source community in 2019. Plus, over 3.6 million software code repositories depend on each of the top 50 open source projects.

So although open source communities are thriving, how are open source powered software vendors faring?

Despite initial skepticism, today investors and end users see the value and potential, of open source software, leading to whole list of open source companies receiving billions in funding every year.

However, now that the open source business model has proven its worth, new challenges have become apparent.

But theres a red herring out there i.e the suggestion that public cloud vendors are hurting open source software

There is a growing perception that cloud vendors are exploiting open source without giving anything back and that open source vendors are hitting back by changing licenses.

But the real issue is that its extremely hard to manage and run a high quality managed service in the cloud and not all open source companies are good at it.

Red Hat enjoyed huge success by becoming the prime open source enterprise vendor at a time where on-premise was the only deployment method for businesses. However, the on-premise paradigm was fundamentally different from the SaaS paradigm. In the former, most of the value of the vendor came from support, training, and services.

They were heavily reliant on human expertise and services, which came with higher churn and lower upsells because these vendors could easily be replaced independent of the software. In contrast, the SaaS open source business model requires the SaaS vendor to be responsible for a host of additional things like providing security and reliability guarantees, and automatic software upgrades.

The two business models are very different, as both the strategic relevance and the level of engineering required by a SaaS-based model are much higher.

Today, as cloud adoption continues to take off, open source vendors are realising that they need to shift to having a SaaS-based offering. But they know cloud vendors are naturally better at operating cloud hosted software. They perceive this as a threat and thus might attempt to block the cloud vendors out by changing the licensing terms.

The reality is open source software itself has zero intrinsic monetisation value because anyone can use it, so there will always be a requirement for open source vendors to determine the value beyond the software.

We believe this value lies in the vendors ability to deliver open source software as a service. The cloud is an inevitability these vendors will need to embrace and prove their performance at scale to cope with the increase in demand for edge computing. Instead of wasting time on pushing cloud providers away, they should be focused on building great SaaS offerings.

Limiting the license of their software will just lead to less adoption and community-driven innovation around those open source projects, which poses a far bigger existential threat to their business.

In recent years, Microsoft, Google and AWS have been very engaged with open source communities and the positive approach from the worlds biggest tech firms is a marked change to how they behaved in the past. In Spring last year, Google announced seven partnerships with open source vendors a landmark statement that open source has arrived for enterprises. Microsoft, fuelled by its strategic mandate, has also hand-picked open source companies to keep innovation vibrant.

Microsoft and Googles pioneering partnership approach is the benchmark for how the big tech giants can help open source tech companies. They are treating them as partners rather than third-party providers by directly integrating them on their cloud platforms and providing clarity in billing and support, all on one interface.

For example, one of the fastest-growing and most broadly used AI and data services on Azure is Azure Databricks, a service provided through a deep partnership between an open source vendor and Microsoft. Today, customers process over two exabytes per month on Azure Databricks with millions of server-hours spinning up every day.

The next frontier will be centred around how open source businesses handle data it captures or creates, its value and the ecosystem built around it. Were only at the beginning of this, and its exciting to see the emergence of economies forming around data itself.

Databricks CEO Ghodsi: its extremely hard to manage and run a high quality managed service in the cloud.

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Databricks CEO: Managing open source in the cloud is hard - ComputerWeekly.com

When discussing alternative operating systems to Microsofts Windows or Apples macOS, Linux often comes to mind. However, while Linux is a recreation of UNIX, FreeBSD is more of a continuation. The free and open source operating system was initially developed by students at the University of California at Berkeley which is why the BSD in its name stands for Berkeley Software Distribution.

FreeBSD runs on its own kernel and all of the operating systems key components have been developed to be part of a single whole. This is where it differs the most from Linux because Linux is just the kernel and the other components are supplied by third parties.

To learn more about FreeBSD and its ongoing development, TechRadar Pro spoke to the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin.

What excites me the most is getting a large financial contribution from a commercial user. Not only does it help us continue the work we are doing, but it also validates the work the community and the Foundation are doing.

Besides that, other aspects that excite me are working with this community, watching people grow within the community, advocating for FreeBSD, working with my team on developing new/improved ways to help the Project and community, and being able to constantly learn and grow in my job.

The FreeBSD Foundations purpose is to support the FreeBSD Project. While were an entirely separate entity, we step in to fill critical needs of the project. To support the development of FreeBSD, we have software developers on staff to quickly step in to fix bugs, implement workarounds to hardware issues, and implement new features and functionality. They also review many of the software changes, providing constructive feedback to continuously help improve the code. In addition, we provide the FreeBSD infrastructure that is hosted around the world and provide staff to oversee continuous integration and quality assurance efforts, to improve testing and code coverage.

Id be remiss if I didnt include our advocacy efforts in supporting development of FreeBSD. We attend technical conferences around the world, giving FreeBSD talks and workshops, to recruit more users and contributors to the Project. Increasing the number of contributors allows more people to step in to help in various areas of the Project, and this will help us with long-term sustainability. New users help test FreeBSD, with their various use cases, helping to identify issues or providing their input on how to improve FreeBSD.

We are 100% dependent on donations to support these efforts, so we are constantly reaching out to commercial users and the community to give a financial contribution.

I wouldnt refer to FreeBSD being the antithesis of Linux, since we both have similarities and are both Unix-like.But the similarities do lend people to think that FreeBSD is a Linux Distribution. However, that is not the case. FreeBSD is descended from the Unix developed at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s. Linux, on the other hand, was built as an open source alternative to UNIX. The similarities do make it easier for Linux developers to get involved with FreeBSD.

Currently there are over 400 active developers and thousands of contributors. FreeBSD works on 32- and 64-bit Intel / AMD x86, 32- and 64-bit Arm, RISC-V, PowerPC, Sparc64, and MIPS CPUs, and cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. There are tens of millions of deployed systems.

As with other BSDs, the FreeBSD base system is an integrated operating system distribution that is developed and released as a cohesive whole by a single team, which is in contrast to the Linux approach of distributions picking up the kernel from one source, the C library from another, the userland tools from another and so on.

FreeBSD operates on the Principle of Least Astonishment. In other words, dont break things that work. Because the OS doesnt change without good reason, if you are basing your code or product on it, you don't have to constantly catch up everytime there is a new OS release. It also makes upgrading relatively painless.The licensing model is probably the biggest difference between the two. Linux is under the GNU General Public License (GPL), meaning in part, that any derivative work of a product released under the GPL must also be supplied with source code if requested. FreeBSD on the other hand, is under the copy-free BSD license. Its less restrictive: binary-only distributions are allowed and particularly useful for embedded platforms.

FreeBSD doesnt include a GUI in the initial install, because it follows the philosophy of starting out with only what you need to develop on FreeBSD. Since FreeBSD offers many GUIs through its ports and packages collection, this allows the user to select the one they want to use.

MacOS uses a significant amount of FreeBSD in its kernel and userland. More specifically they use the networking stack and a fair bit of userland, like libraries and utilities. For example, most of their command line is FreeBSD.

Some of the software development efforts going on include, improving performance and scalability, increasing the hardware support, adding OpenZFS Raid-Z Expansion functionality, improving graphics and desktop support, improving OpenJDK on FreeBSD and improved wifi support. In addition, there is exciting news coming out of the University of Cambridge with their CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) collaborative effort with Arm to create a CHERI/ARM processor (you can find out more here).

Other plans include increasing our advocacy efforts, by increasing the FreeBSD workshops and FreeBSD talks around the globe.

Theres no limitation on who should consider using FreeBSD! It is perfect for someone who cares about rock solid stability and high performance. It has ZFS for protecting your data. FreeBSD has a community that is friendly, helpful, and approachable, and it provides excellent documentation to easily find answers. There are over 30,000 open source software packages that are easy to install, allowing you to easily set up your environment without a lot of extras, and that includes many choices of popular GUIs. Finally, our philosophy of dont break things that work is very appealing.

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Supporting an open source operating system: a Q&A with the FreeBSD Foundation - Techradar

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As more enterprises embrace open source software for applications ranging from security and cloud management to databases and analytics, the steady shift away from proprietary software is coalescing around a community-based open source movement.

According to an annual snapshot on the state of enterprise open source tools released by open source leader Red Hat, expensive proprietary software licenses and fear of vendor lock-in are driving the enterprise embrace of open source code.

As more hyper-scalers contribute code to cloud management and other projects, the Red Hat survey estimates that community-based open source software usage will reach 21 percent of companies surveyed by 2022.

For instance, frequent code contributor Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) released a stable version of a programming language called Dart in December 2019. Less than two months later, a recent survey of popular search queries found the object-oriented tool for running applications on multiple platforms was among the fastest growing programming languages.

At the same time, the rise of open source development centered around key stakeholders has raised concerns that the very same vendors of proprietary software are acting with what observers call enlightened self-interest to gain a foothold in burgeoning open source communities.

Microsofts 2018 acquisition of the GitHub collaboration platform, for example, raised immediate concerns about the future direction of open source development on GitHub, which at the time of the $7.5 billion acquisition was used by more than 28 million developers. For the most part, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has so far made good on its pledge to maintain GitHubs developer-first ethos.

Microsoft and other hyper-scalers have gravitated toward open source tools as community-based efforts have improved the quality and security of code. Indeed, the Red Hat survey found that more than half of respondents cited security and cloud management as the key reasons for shifting to open source tools. Along with cost, open source adopters also cited the growing number of cloud-native projects and the ability to safely leverage open source tech.

Infrastructure modernization was the leading use case for open source (60 percent), followed by application development (53 percent) and DevOps (52 percent). Those modernization efforts include the greater use of micro-services running on multi-cloud deployments. That enterprise trend has been driven open source orchestration tools like the de facto standard Kubernetes platform, originally developed by Google.

Indeed, micro-services such as application containers and other cloud-native technologies are driving the enterprise shift to open source. The survey found that 56 percent of those polled expected to increase use of containers over the next 12 months.

While security was the top use case for open source, survey respondents also cited lingering concerns about code security as the leading barrier to open source adoption. Across the four geographic regions covered by the open source survey, an average of 38 percent of respondents citedcode security as a concern.

Red Hats response? Security might refer to a belief that the availability of source code makes software more susceptible to attacksalthough thats rarely the way in which vulnerabilities are exploited.

The results indicate a market environment driven by collaborative innovation, said Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst, who was named president of parent company IBM (NYSE: IBM) in a management shakeup announced at the end of January.

Red Hats enterprise open source study is based on interviews with 950 IT executives, including 400 in the U.S.

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About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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'Community-based' Open Source on the Rise - EnterpriseAI