Linux and open-source are everywhere. It doesn’t matter what sector you serve (from manufacturing, data, retail, or the service industry), open-source is either already playing a role in your company or it will in the future.
You may not even realize that open-source technology is helping to power and drive your business forward, but it is. There’s simply no way around it. You might have originally started the company using nothing but proprietary software, but those days are long gone. Without open-source and Linux, most businesses would struggle to keep up with the competition.
So just how will Linux and open-source technology play a big role in your company’s future? Let’s find out.
The Cloud
It’s no secret that Linux and open-source software powers the cloud. In fact, Linux-based images make up 60% of those found on Azure. That’s considerable, especially given that Microsoft is the company behind Azure.
But it’s not just Linux images being deployed to clouds, it’s that Linux and open-source are the tools that actually make the cloud run. Even Google uses a large amount of open-source to help power their various platforms. Google even open-sources a number of the tools they create (such as TensorFlow). You can check out a number of the open-source projects Google has made available to the public.
Software Stacks
Nearly every software stack available uses open-source software. In fact, finding a software stack that uses only proprietary software is nearly impossible. And given how your business must take advantage of one or more software stacks, it’s inevitable that your company will, at some point, have to use open-source software. From the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack to a frontend stack of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to a backend stack of Python, Django, NGINX, and MySQL, open-source it as the very foundation of nearly every stack available.
Development Languages
You would be surprised to find out how many development languages are open-source. JavaScript, Python, PHP, Swift, R, C++, Go, and Kotlin are often included in the top ten programming languages in use. And, of course, all of those languages are open-source. So, if your company plans on building web applications, mobile applications, front-end applications or backend services, you will be using open-source.
Containers
Containers are massive these days. Granted this technology mostly only benefits larger companies, but that doesn’t mean medium-sized companies can’t also take advantage of portable, scalable, highly available services and applications deployed to a clustered environment. Although you could develop for containers on either macOS or Windows, you won’t be deploying them to scale on those platforms. Both the technology to create, deploy, and manage containers is open-source, the most widely-used platform for deployment is Linux. So, if your business has any intention of using either Docker or Kubernetes, you’ll need to embrace the open-source operating system before doing so.
AI/Machine Learning
AI and machine learning have both made significant inroads into the world of business. And given how broad the use-cases are for AI/ML, there’s almost no way of avoiding this technology in your business. Some companies use AI/ML specifically for data purposes (for things like mining data and locating trends in data). Other companies employ AI/ML to add agile development into their software development lifecycle. So if you want to venture into the realm of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continous Deployment), AI will certainly be a requirement at some point in the development pipeline.
It should come as no surprise that much of AI/ML technology (such as TensorFlow) is open-source. And the development languages that are best suited for AI/ML (such as Python) are also open-source.
Big Data
If you want to join the exciting world of Big Data, prepare to accept open-source into your business. Some of the most important tools in Big Data are open-source, such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, HPCC, Apache Storm, Apache SAMOA, and Elastic Search. These tools are crucial to working with massive troves of data. And if you want to work with data lakes and data warehouses, once again you’ll be dealing with open-source technologies.
Big Data is not going away. Nearly every large business across the globe depends on these giant collections of data. And even some of the tools used to analyze and visualize this data are open-source. Software platforms like Grafana, Redash, D3, and Google Charts all depend on open-source technology.
Conclusion
Open-source drives innovation, big business, and much of the technology that users depend on every day. From the innocuous Google Drive to massively used and interactive social media (such as Facebook and Twitter), these technology platforms wouldn’t be near as widely usable without open-source software and Linux.
So, the big question now is how will Linux and open-source play a big role in your company’s future?
