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 to succeed.
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.
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. 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 . However, due to open-source alignment, customers continue to have the option to run it for free themselves . This untethers them from a vendor or a model based on their business needs.