The Future is More Open Than Ever for YOU

Background

Every year 54 Open Source software industry leaders and collaborating organizations led by North Bridge Venture Partners issue a Future of Open Source study that reports on the state of the open source industry and analysis of future trends. Now in its eighth year, the 2014 survey was record-breaking in every way with over 1,240 respondents.

This year’s results revealed three key insights. You can view the entire survey here:

The Democratization of Open Source and the Rise of the Open Source ‘Native’.

By its nature, anyone can participate in Open Source. But participation used to be mainly by being an onlooker, as opposed to a contributor who really gives code back. Our survey shows that as of 2014 the democratization of Open Source has changed all that. We are both witnessing a new Open Source ‘native’ generation that views contributing back as a point of pride and a mark of achievement. And the enterprises and vendors they are joining are now supporting that contribution proactively and organizing to not only participate but even start entirely new projects.

Open Source as the New Foundational Platform

The open source debate we enjoyed a decade ago when starting this program is clearly over. Open Source is simply more innovative, secure and agile and it’s become reliable up and down the entire stack, creating a new foundational platform for users, vendors and enterprises to rely on. But instead of the platform being vendor-led this time, it’s truly Open Source at the foundation. It’s on this basis that our survey reveals people thinking of Open Source first as the foundation for on which to build their applications and cloud services, many of which would simply not be economical otherwise.

The Proliferation of Open Source and Formation of new Communities in a Virtuous Cycle

As a result of all this, Open Source is enjoying a grassroots-led proliferation that starts with a growing number of new developers and extends through the vendors and enterprises to the applications and services, industries and verticals, reaching more people and things in our everyday lives than ever before. As the benefits of speed to market are experienced this is attracting communities to form that collaborate to solve more and more specialized problems on an increasingly reinforcing basis. All this is creating a virtuous circle of Open Source expansion. Indeed there are now over 1 million open source projects with over 100 billion lines of code and 10 million people contributing.

In just one of my own investments, Acquia, we are seeing the Drupal project with over 1 million participants in the ecosystem creating tens of thousands of modules to enable web content, communities, and commerce to life for organizations as diverse as GE, Harvard and Whole Foods, serving millions of sites to hundreds of millions of people. And we’ve only just begun.

You can view the full results of the study in the SlideShare here or at the top of this post.

Thanks to all the collaborators in 2014 who have helped us refine and who have contributed to making the survey a success.

As always I’m curious to know what you think. How do you see Open Source in your world?

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At Underscore VC, Michael and his team partner with daring entrepreneurs to invest in founders and build from inception to market leaders. As a former entrepreneur turned VC, Michael has backed and built teams that have created billions of dollars of value focusing on large, market-changing technologies such as Cloud Computing, IoT and Big Data as well as disruptive business models such as Open Source and SaaS. Current representative investments include Acquia, Cazena, Demandware (NYSE:DWRE), Mautic and Salsify.

Follow Michael on LinkedIn, Twitter @mjskok, his website, and in his Harvard Innovation Lab class, Startup Secrets. Follow Underscore VC on the web and Twitter @UnderscoreVC.