Why Open Source Software (OSS) changed the proprietorship game

Some of the biggest industries in the technology space, like IBM that recently acquired Red Hat, and Microsoft followed up by acquiring GitHub, are either buying or developing Open Source technologies. From what started as a mere, free source-code platform; it has now become a legitimate business operational machine.

We’re all aware of the recent rave over Open Source since the declaration of CoWIN to be open source. Aside from the big technological growth, India is empowering towards, Open Source has been a widely accepted idea in our global growth industries.  Most businesses are now turning to Open Source for software, operational and workflow efficiency. It has become a much talked about the subject due to its infinite potential, possibilities and results over a long period.

How Open Source is changing our everyday life?

Open source has been revolutionizing the creative aspect of our life, we are surrounded by its futuristic approach to innovation and we are merely watching as it enhances our evolution in unprecedented ways.

Open Source – Future

Why most businesses are opting for Open Source?

There are many reasons why most people are turning to open source, it’s not just due to its cost-effective implementation, the wide knowledge space it provides or even the efficiency of using these source codes in software development.

It’s because it has been created to encourage participation, exchange of knowledge, and allows countless users to brainstorm and come up with the most advanced solutions to pre-existing codes. This is why we believe Open source is for anyone; whether you’re a software developer, business owner, entrepreneur or just a curious mind.

Lyra attests to the growth potential of Open Source

More and more Industries are turning to open source…

There are many reasons why most businesses are turning to open source, it’s not just due to its cost-effective implementation, the wide knowledge space it provides or even the efficiency of using these source codes in software development.

It is because open source has been created to encourage participation, exchange of knowledge, and allows countless users to brainstorm and come up with the most advanced solutions to pre-existing codes.

Open Source – Benefits

Most of us are well aware of the benefits of Open Source and the current situation if anything just proves that it is impartial to any kind of work, business, community or people. Open Source can be used by anyone, literally and has a lot of convenience and profitability in daily work: 

1. Shift focus from low quality work to high quality

Open source has been known to solve most problems for its users.

Management, overlooking of tasks, managing projects, skills or individual responsibilities have been made easier from the content repository, management, overlooking of tasks. While developers could mainly focus on troubleshooting, bug fixing and solving problems on raised tickets.

This allows the developers to systematically manage all these processes, meet un-faced challenges, work on new codes, find newer technologies to invent.

Since the open-source is a wide space with pre-existing codes, a lot of basic data is already available for use, this makes more space for new opportunities, for people to work towards new ideas and creations.

2. Code ownership cost is less to almost negligible on open source

Since the open-source enforces that procreators of code upload them with no licensing fee, modifiers can almost use the code for a less cost compared to other propriety alternatives that are involved in licensing a software code.

This reduces the overall cost of adopting open source for its codes and incorporating pre-existing features allows the developers to work towards creating results to the foundation of pre-existing codes.

If one goes through a proprietorship license, the cost of training, maintaining, developing, managing skills, time duration for task completion and supporting get very expensive for the owner. Having to pay for so many functionalities can be very hard on the economical part and can be easily avoided by using the free intellectual property available in the open-source community while working around licensing and legal formalities.

3. Open source is a futuristic practice of keeping up with innovations as well as their innovators

It is almost impossible to not come across startups, organizations, businesses or industry leaders shying away from saying that they use open source. Yes, they all agree that it has been able to create a fad among generation leaders because it impacts the way we now work when compared to the older times when it was so hard to come across new ideas or innovations.

Open source has offered a modern approach to coding, building software programs and working on technology-related ideas. It is exceedingly focusing on collaborative work rather than individual work. Even renounced companies like Microsoft, Apple and Swift have moved from their traditional practices and have started using open-source for their daily work as well. Today the largest corporations like IBM, SAP and Adobe are a part of the open-source community because it is our generations way of working together towards many progressive goals.

4. Contributing, sharing knowledge, pooling resources and working together is the way to make advanced and upstream upgrades to one’s existing work

Open source is a well-knit community, where it is highly encouraged to take active participation for both building better technology as well as sharing it. Just like the relationship between well reasoning neighbors makes a good community, the same goes for reasonable users of the open-source space.

It is almost impossible for any person to be able to perfect all the codes they write or even get satisfactory results from their labor. Rather than creating closed source codes, most developers leave it out into the community to get better desirable results from the same code. It allows you to see how people have better equipped your code, fixed errors and advanced it to reach better and efficient results than you had foreseen.

Without it, many of the technologies we take for granted today would never have developed or would be locked away behind patent law. This has been a successful reason behind revolutionizing the idea of ‘technology for innovation’ and has been the core reason behind our rapid development and shift in the global economy. Especially during a Global pandemic such as the Covid-19, we’re witnessing what was assumed to be an unthinkable solution that has currently changed the statistics of India. 

Open Source – License Compliance

By placing an open-source license on one’s work, one agrees to the following terms:

• The entire code will be open for public access.
• Re-engineering, modifying, fixing and manipulating the code to meet personal goals cannot be controlled by the proprietor of the code. It will be available for the public, to use as per their requirement.
• Derivative ownership of the code is given to the user, this way one can legitimately use the available code without any legal licensing issues.
• Once the code is uploaded on Open Source, the proprietor has no control over who uses it, how it is modified or what functionality is it used for.

For example, WordPress is open-source software. Anyone can use it for free, or pay for certain ownership services. Anyone can use it, modify it, personalize and use it for their purpose. The proprietors of WordPress cannot control how the user uses it, whether you make it an e-commerce site, or use it for personal blogging or use it for your business goals.

What are the various requirements of using open source and its license compliance?

Open source is very different from proprietor licensing when using any proprietorship software’s, the user usually agrees to the terms that don’t allow them to modify the code, the code is hidden from anyone to access and the proprietor can take legal action if the code has been modified in any way.

Open source code bases are also called “Copyleft licensed codes”, this means that anyone that releases a modified software code and they must also release the program along with it. It imposes the user to release the modified version of the code and the program’s source code without charging a licensing fee.

Learn more about open source license compliance →

Open Source – Support

Some of the biggest challenges that organizations face today with supporting their open source software are:

• Open Source Security and Open Source Compliance risks
• Difficulty in finding support for Open Source Software other than OS community
• Interoperability problems Integration, support issues with existing projects and open source technologies
• Performance and system management
• Network Planning
• Configuration Management
• Fault Management
• Security Management
• Performance Management

Partner now with Lyra for productive and effective open source support →

Open source components and their use cases:

Manage Open Source Components

While working in open source, it is very important to understand the technicalities involved in working within the open source. Yes, there are free source- codes available, but not all codes are free to use.

Thus, having a supportive partner can help you mitigating security risks through comprehensive OSS logistics solutions by:

• Automatically identifying open source security vulnerabilities
• Assess and remediate known vulnerabilities
• Continuously monitor your codebase for future security vulnerabilities
• Discover and track what specific open source components are in use within their applications
• Identify security vulnerabilities reported against specific open-source software components
• Assess which specific applications use components with known vulnerabilities

No matter who you are, or what you do; open source is a platform designed to co-create with like-minded people. It has been changing the way we did business back in the day and in a way it has taught us that innovations require great minds to work together. So what’s stopping you from using Open-Source and leveraging its efficiency to your advantage?

Get in touch with us at info@lyrainfo.com for a free consultation session from our experts.