Enterprises are often characterized as repulsive to open source software, both in usage and offerings. Building enterprise software is not only about building software, but also about building processes. Open source software usually lacks long-lasting patrons that can provide support to such processes and thus present itself as a serious contender to proprietary offerings. Therefore enterprises are usually hesitant with adopting open source software solutions and as a result end up not putting their offerings as OSS either, creating an impasse.
A new line of thought has emerged recently, however, in which enterprises are offering their solutions under OSS licenses. This rise is mostly fueled by the success of products like Android, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and many more. Here are 5 reasons why enterprises are choosing to open source their products increasingly:
Builds User Base and Trust
When the users can evaluate the product before making a commitment to it, they have a better fulfillment experience. An important point to note is that OSS does not mean that the product is free of cost. Enterprises usually have two parallel offerings; a Community Edition that is free of cost and an Enterprise Edition that has some additional features, plus other important add-ons like priority support, SLA, and self-hosting, all of which are very important for large enterprises. This model is used by companies like Gitlab, OroCommerce and Hashicorp. Another model of operation is of offering the product free of cost and charging for the services. Companies like MongoDB and Elastic are prominent examples of this model. By offering the product (or a variant like a Community Edition) free of cost, companies can garner users at a much faster rate. The market penetration provided by this strategy is immensely important.
Agile By Design
Enterprises are often criticized for being too rigid, no matter how much they try to reinvent their processes for more fluidity. This forced agility doesnt help anyone though. By open sourcing their offerings, enterprises are delegating the project management and voting on important decisions to their user base. As a consequence, decisions are actually based in what the users want. Thus instead of changing goals and priorities based on the speculated user demand, the business can entrust their user base to drive the goals.
Security By Openness
The idea of security by obscurity is fundamentally wrong. The most secure and robust systems are those that are open to audit by the community. By having a responsible disclosure policy and a bug bounty program, enterprises can find the problems at a much faster rate than possible before. The very aptly named OpenWhisperSystems that runs the security-focused messaging app Signal is a prime example of this.
Best Features Trickle Down
Community Edition acts as a testing ground for features and A/B testing for products. The features that are successful can then be enhanced and implemented in a more nuanced way in the Enterprise Edition. Letting the users submit merge requests to the project provides a big boost to the speed of development and bug fixes.
Finding New Talent
Open sourcing the product provides an incentive for the users to hack on its codebase. What could be better for a company than having many talented engineers who are already proficient in working on their systems! They get to choose the best out of the best. Examples of this approach are projects like ReactJS by Facebook and Tensorflow by Google. By open sourcing these frameworks, Facebook and Google have created a potential way to train their future workforce even before they are hired, all the while giving back to the community as well.
With enterprises releasing their products under open and permissive licenses more often than ever, we are witnessing a rejuvenation of the Open Source ecosystem. This trend is bound to grow in the coming years as more and more enterprises come to realize the benefits.
