We collaborated with a range of companies that surveyed dozens of IT professionals about their favourite free and open source tools through our social media channels, internal surveys, and the Spiceworks community, and the results give us the best view of the free tools they use. Work becomes easier and teams are more productive. As open core businesses and communities drive innovation, open source software is likely to play a key role at multiple levels of the enterprise software stack, from operating systems and programming languages ​​to middleware and development tools. The success of open source software can ignite a vicious circle: more projects will emerge, more developers will be attracted, and open source software will be more widely used. Unlike proprietary software, open source provides transparency about its development or origins, based on the belief that better software and stronger communities can only be achieved when the technology is available to all.

Unlike the source code of proprietary software, which is kept secret by the vendor, open source software is developed publicly so that it can be easily tested, modified, and distributed for free. The vast majority of proprietary software is created by small teams of developers, while open source software, depending on the type of project, can range from a handful of contributors to thousands of people who may work on the project. Companies whose businesses focus on developing open source software use a variety of business models to solve the problem of making money by providing software that, by definition, is licensed for free. Many of the many options involve an “open core” model, in which open source software companies develop open source software elements and other valuable elements for combined products.

The proprietary version may be licensed to fund ongoing software development. While changes to proprietary and closed source software are possible, making changes to closed source software is generally a complex process that immediately violates the contract and will not be supported by the vendor. When a piece of closed-source proprietary software is discontinued, many companies must find a replacement, if any, to keep the business running. While open source software may have eaten the world, the developers and companies behind open source projects often lack meaningful information about the use and distribution of their projects, which Scarfe set out to fix.

By building scalable software solutions using open source tools, they can reduce product development costs, speed up product development cycles (develop, test, deploy, and provision) and achieve higher code quality standards, as well as facilitate collaboration and optimise maintenance.

A young company called Cerbos uses its own open-source approach to user permissions that works across all languages ​​and platforms and gives companies full visibility into how they handle user data. CloudBerry Backup for Linux is an open source backup, restore, and validation software designed for businesses with certain complexities, although these complexities actually define its powerful features, such as backup configurations, remote backup, and many more.

Open source is here to stay and makes for a great base on which to build something special, whatever line of business you may be in.