Open Source Technologies Thrive in the Age of SaaS and Cloud

As we are moving some infrastructure to SaaS applications, I am reminded of previous debates about the effect of SaaS applications on Open Source Technologies. It's pretty clear that the growth in Open Source has accelerated and has even been enabled by the presence of game changers like SaaS and Cloud. The ability to cheaply and rapidly get new products to market has made the use of Open Source vital to many organizations and the sheer number of options is staggering. At OpenLogic, we build SaaS applications and those applications use hundreds of Open Source components. In fact, CloudSwing now contains more Open Source libraries in less than a year of development than OLEX has in over 4 years of development.

There are a few areas where Open Source has yet to make significant inroads that SaaS applications may have affected going forward. The inability to create a serious competitor to MS Office coupled with the rise of Google Docs have made it very difficult for Open Source alternatives to gain any real significant momentum. The most significant Open Source option has been hampered by continued uncertaintly around OpenOffice/LibreOffice communities in the wake of Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The other area where SaaS offerings are likely affecting the growth of open source options is true enterprise groupware. Sure there are plenty of mail server options in the Open Source space, but a true enterprise level competitor to MS Exchange has never really taken off. Hosted options such as Google Apps for Business and Office 365 are now giving many companies an easier option than managing a in-house alternatives.

While end user applications are often the last things for Open Source options to replace, foundational pieces such as libraries, frameworks, and servers continue to be areas of strength that are leading the industry into the future. Big Data is dominated by Open Source options such as Hadoop. Almost all the hot new frameworks (Ruby, Rails, Node.js, Python, PHP) in web application development are being driven by Open Source communities. Cloud platforms are dominated by Linux OS's such as Ubuntu and Open Source frameworks (Heroku/Rails).

In addition to the new technologies driving the industry forward, many of the old reliables continue to remain popular with our customers. We continue to see strong interest in key components such as Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, and MySQL. Interest in Open Source is very broad as companies continue to search for the best technologies to solve their problems. Expect this trend to continue to grow as new ideas build on each other to take the industry to even greater heights.



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