Forget the year of the pig, is 2019 the year of open source?

Those of you non-geeks out there may well have heard the phrase ‘open source’, but not quite be sure of what it means. Well, in short, open source software licenses give users freedoms they would not otherwise have. If a program is open source, its source code is freely available to its users. Its users – and anyone else – have the ability to take this source code, modify it, and distribute their own versions of the program. The users also have the ability to distribute as many copies of the original program as they want. Anyone can use the program for any purpose; there are no licensing fees or other restrictions on the software.

The development community has relied on open source software for decades. Recently, the big tech companies followed suit. They like open source because it enables them to work in a collaborative way, rather than reinvent the wheel every time.

For software to be classified as open source, it must comply with the Open Source Initiative (OSI)’s 10 point Open Source Definition (OSD), and it must also be distributed on a licence approved by the OSI.  Anyone can write software, but not anyone can have code they have written accepted as a contribution to an open source software package of repute.

But open source is more than software with a fancy classification. It’s a development eco-system, allowing integration, interoperability and cost savings. It’s the basis of inter-company collaboration. The structured minds of coders create self-regulatory environments with amazing governance structures.

And its going mainstream. Communities of individuals continue to create open source, but many in these communities are now paid by companies to make those contributions. Organisations like the Linux Foundation and Open Stack Foundation are funded millions of dollars by multinational companies to allow them to safeguard open source code and projects.

Rockstar developers then compete to solve bugs and viruses, and organisations such as Tidelift are securing millions in funding to ensure that packages which might once have been orphaned will benefit from maintenance and support, long after their development communities have moved on to the next thing.

It’s come a long way.

Over the last 40 years open source has moved from the hobbyist, to the big business. Alongside digitisation, and cheap and efficient consumer devices, cloud has had a significant part to play in the dramatic turnaround in the success of open source.

Of course, some still try to abuse the nature of open source. It has taken many proprietary software companies years to move beyond aggression and attacks on open source, to acceptance of the need to play nicely with the others, or be left behind in the age of collaboration.

As companies follow a path of digitisation, no matter how reluctantly, they are accepting that their products and services are manufactured, distributed or consumed through technology, and that the use of cloud is essential to all business success. That means they are appreciating the need for smart, resilient software that can scale in a cost-effective way to support the cloud infrastructure.

DigitalOcean’s “Developer trends in the cloud” report in late 2018 stated that 55% of the developers surveyed are contributing to the open source. And is if that wasn’t enough, a massive 71% of companies expect that their developers will use open source in their day to day work.

AWS (Amazon Web Server)’s cloud services sit on a number of operating systems, but by the reckoning of The Cloud Market’s count of Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances, Canonical’s Ubuntu is used in 314,492 instances, more than any other operating system.  Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical is apparently primed for an IPO – watch this space for what may be the first significant IPO in open source. Notably provided by a UK company.

Companies like Sales Agility, Codethink and OpusVL are taking their place in the UK. The Linux Foundation proudly announced the addition of her Majesty’s Government to its membership in December.

So as the UK’s open source developers head off to join thousands of others at Europe’s biggest open source event, Fosdem, on 2 and 3 February, let’s see. Maybe 2019 is the year of open source in the UK.