Open source has seen growing popularity over the last few years, and this trend is well expected to continue into our digital future. Organisations today are recognizing their own reliance on open source, thus investing in it, contributing towards it and releasing their own open source projects. The key motivation behind adopting open source goes beyond just its lower costs, innovation, agility, or pool of community developers – it is increasingly emerging as a strategic choice from a business perspective.

According to GitHub, in 2022 alone, there were over 413 million contributions made to open source projects, and more than 20 million people from world over joined GitHub.

We may not realize it, but much of the technology we consume on a daily basis runs on open source – be it our cars, phones, planes, and now the world-altering AI applications. It is a democratizing force that empowers developers to create solutions that are accessible, customizable, and secure. Between Linux OS championing so many businesses, NGINX and Apache powering over 60% of the world’s websites, and Kubernetes powering cloud computing; open source is swiftly and steadily taking the reins of the software industry.

Let’s take a look at the top expected trends for open source in 2023 and beyond:

1. Maturity and method in the adoption of Open Source

A growing pool of companies are putting in place open source program offices (OSPOs) to better manage open source operations and structures. According to GitHub, over 30% of Fortune 100 companies have implemented OSPOs to help structure organizational policies and procedures around open source – and they expect this number to increase.

In 2023, this trend will vastly become a norm for enterprises – creating OSPOs as a centralised setup for all aspects of open source operations, from setting guidelines and compliance, to training and fostering community engagement. Businesses will bring a sophistication in open source adoption by contributing to projects as a way to eliminate skillset gaps and thus exercising influence too. Going beyond just addition of talents in the development space, leaders will be introduced to drive open source strategy and compliance at an executive level, so expect to see titles akin to COSO (Chief Open Source Officer) co-working with the likes of CTOs and CISOs. LinkedIn will see some unusual titles now!

2. Real-time Data Management and Insights

Since data drives real-time and actionable insights for businesses, it is directly proportionate to customer engagement and success. Fortunately, open source is and will continue to play an important role in collaborating and supporting integrations across value chains, enhancing interoperability to co-create solutions for a frictionless flow of ideas and data within the organisation.

With an abundant reservoir of open source tools and technologies available now, enterprises will aim at supporting rapid innovation and heightened scalability – with better data pipeline processes and observability across enterprises. Both data pipeline and observability platforms are going to be the top areas of focus for CTOs and CIOs in 2023 in order to deliver future-ready data management systems and business outcomes.

Be it database types, distributed search, data analytics or BI practices – the availability of open source solutions in this space is simply overwhelming. The good news here is many options to choose from, and even better news is the increasing pool of open source service providers. Working with external service providers will be a big trend this year onward, to tackle internal open source skill-set challenges or simply to steer internal teams in other lucrative areas and thus amplify all-round business growth.

3. DevOps and Automation

Open source will keep being the backbone for DevOps and Automation by feeding the best-fitted options of tools and frameworks needed to streamline the development and deployment processes. Of companies with at least 60% of their DevOps portfolio as open source, a full 54% had reached the “fully deployed” DevOps state, indicates this study.

Here are some open source DevOps and Automation tools that will gain further momentum in 2023:

• Grafana Prometheus and ELK Stack provide monitoring and logging capabilities, enabling teams to track the performance and health of their applications and infrastructure.
• Infrastructure as code (IaC): Open source tools like Terraform enable teams to define and provision infrastructure using code, reducing the risk of configuration drift and increasing consistency across environments.
• Infrastructure automation for faster deployment and monitoring will be another critical focal point. This CloudOps Automation tool promises multi-platform support and scalable infra management, helping you cut down time and effort, while giving you complete control and security.
• For continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), open source software tools like Hashicorp, Jenkins, and GitLab will continue to enable developers to automate build, test, and deployment processes, allowing for faster and more frequent releases.
• Automating PostgreSQL simplifies deployment, management and scaling of Postgres efficiently with single interface tools like My-Postgres. Helping in creating one’s own Postgres cloud and achieve cloud-like functionality without being tied down with cloud-native offerings, across any platform.
• Kubernetes and Docker enables containerization and orchestration in turn automating deployment, scaling, and management.

4. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI-powered software may be elevating human work today, but the field of AI is estimated to be about 67 years old now (known to originate at the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop in New Hampshire). Experts state the one thing that has actually helped AI advance tremendously in the last few years is open source. It is predicted that we will see an ‘AI-native’ era of apps and businesses built on the fundamental premise of AI and open source data.

Let’s see how open source pillars the AI, ML world dominance:

1. Community and Collaboration: Open source AI and ML projects are backed by a large and active community of developers, researchers, and users. This will provide organizations with a wealth of resources and collaborative support for building and deploying AI models.
2. Customization and Accessibility: Getting a higher degree of customization and flexibility for building and deploying of AI models is easier now, thanks to a growing number of open source tools and libraries. Making AI, ML more accessible to a wider range of organizations and individuals, regardless of size or budget.
3. Cost Savings: Open source AI and ML tools are free to use, which significantly reduces the cost of building powerful models and deploying AI applications quickly.

Together, AI and Open Source will forge to revolutionize our new normal, and our digital future sure seems bright!

5. Internet of Things (IoT)

The IoT market is expected to grow exponentially in 2023 and beyond, hence the open source community is right on track in building new IoT platforms that can support a vast array of devices, sensors, and protocols. In a Black Duck survey, 78% of respondents stated they use open source software in their IoT solutions today. Now, with the advent of 5G, there is a weighty increase expected in the number of connected or IoT devices, and open source will continue to be vastly leveraged for the efficient management of these devices.

Just like today’s popular IoT platforms like Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Eclipse IoT etc. are pillared by open source, it is predicted that open source will augment IoT further by making it more robust, scalable and cost efficient – to bring advanced features such as edge computing and machine learning – enabling developers to create intelligent and sophisticated solutions.

Open source will also be used to address some key IoT challenges on security and interoperability. Thanks to open standards, developers will be able to create highly interoperable IoT solutions that can work seamlessly with other systems, without comprising on security concerns like data privacy and device security.

Open source is the future of technologies and our new digital ecosphere. It will continue to transform the way we build software, collaborate on projects, and solve urgent world issues. If we want to be a part of tomorrow’s innovations, let’s embrace open source today, join its global developer community, and together build solutions we all need.