tl;dr
🔮 Greater Innovation
👯♀️ Increased Adoption aka more users!
🤝 Modularity aka "you never start from scratch"
🦾 Better Code Quality
🙏 Community Engagement
🫶 Positive Brand Perception
Hey peeps!
A question I thought instantly when hearing about open source was: “If some companies make their project open source, why would they spend their money and resources to give it away for free?”.
This is a valid question, and the nuances of open source often lie in a couple of key factors.
For a real-world example, consider HashiCorp. They recently transitioned Terraform, their tool for defining and provisioning infrastructure as code, from an open-source license to a business source license. This move has proved to be highly controversial (read more on hackernews 🤺).
So, this boils down to the question: “Why do companies create software on Open Source?”. Let's look at this together! 👇
Quick Note: If you want to start contributing to the right projects in open source, you can filter by your language and topic preferences using the (completely free 🤫) tool quine.
At a high level, there are 6 main reasons why both big or small companies want to develop software on open source:
1. 🔮 Greater Innovation
Open source projects have by definition various people worldwide working together. They volunteer their time and expertise to work on the same project.
This means that the diversity of this “workforce” fosters innovation. This enables companies to leverage external expertise and insights to drive the development of new products and services.
2. 👯♀️ Increased Adoption aka more users!
Open source projects help companies gain widespread adoption of their technology, attracting users who might not otherwise have tried their products or services. This is because a lot of software is paid whereas open source projects are “free” of use.
Note: Most open-source projects are free of use by individuals. However, it can get quite complex when other organisations use open-source software. We won’t get into it here, but there is a bit of a rabbit hole of what can be used or not based on the type of licenses the open-source project has.
3. 🤝 Modularity aka "stand on the shoulder of giants"
Open source software (OSS) is built on the philosophy of creating programs that do one thing well and can work together. Closed source programs, on the other hand, tend to lock users into their ecosystem and keep adding features instead of collaborating. OSS thrives because it allows developers to build upon existing work. In other words, organisations that use open source stand "on the shoulders of giants" rather than having to start from scratch. This collaborative approach leads to more integrated and versatile software solutions.
4. 🦾 Better Code Quality
By making open-source code, companies can receive feedback and contributions from a much bigger community of developers than if they did this with their X amount of engineers. Ultimately this will improve the quality of their software products and services.
5. 🙏 Community Engagement
Open source projects fosters engagement with the wider developer community, allowing companies to establish relationships with key influencers and thought leaders.
6. 🫶 Positive Brand Perception
Supporting open source enhances a company's reputation by showcasing its commitment to community, collaboration, and innovation. It also re-affirms your position in the market to make sure your name is always there. We will see how Google leveraged this fantastically and continued to position their brand and reputation in the AI realm.
The Google example: TensorFlow 🦾
One example of an open-source project is the TensorFlow project, released in November 2015 by Google. TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework that allows developers to build and deploy machine learning models.
As of the time of writing, the TensorFlow project has been a massive success and here are the positive outcomes Google experienced:
TensorFlow was extensible by the fact of being OSS. If there were some new layers, functions or gradient calculations that a researcher wanted, they could build them themselves. This became a playground for innovation and helped google win against its competitors. 🥇
By making TensorFlow open source, Google continued to attract top talent in machine learning and AI, strengthening their internal teams.
The open-source release of TensorFlow spurred the development of a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools, making it more powerful and user-friendly.
Feedback from the community helped Google identify and fix issues, ensuring TensorFlow met the needs of diverse users and accelerated its growth.
As a result of the above, TensorFlow's popularity soared as it became a go-to choice for researchers, developers, and businesses, boosting Google's reputation in AI. 📈
All in all, this article showed you the various factors behind why companies are interested in creating open-source software.
Whilst the reasons above tend to be the primary rationale for building in open source, some companies can still find ways to benefit financially from open source and this was looked at more in-depth here.
I hope you enjoyed this article and that it brought you some value. 🚀
Keep slaying,
Your Dev.to buddy 💚
If you're looking for a platform to discover open-source projects aligned with your interests and your programming language preference and do it, whilst not spending a penny, visit quine.sh 🫶.
If you haven't yet, you could join our discord server if you need any help or have any questions. 🫶
Top comments (9)
Fantastic article :)
🙏
Great Article <3
Thanks for this Hasan! 🫶
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Thanks a lot for the nice comment g5f 🔥
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