Amidst an industry landscape in which major players are still evolving in their understanding and appreciation of open source, it’s worth laying out in more detail what a spectrum of open source maturity might look like. What are the various milestones along that path, and how does an organization reach them? Important as those questions are, however, it’s necessary first to understand two critical things about open source and technology vendors.
The most important thing to understand about an organization’s relationship with open source is that they have one whether they like it or not. Every organization large and small is operating in a world suffused with open source, so even those against it on principle – of which there are fewer today than a decade ago, to be sure – still by definition have a relationship with it.
The second most important thing to understand about an organization’s relationship with open source is that – unlike the licenses themselves – it is not binary. It is instead complicated and multi-faceted, and exists along a continuum. One part of an organization may be operating in service of open source while another opposes it. Decades ago, for example, in the days of the old Microsoft in which open source was a third rail issue with its former leadership, the company aggressively and publicly campaigned against open source even as it shipped permissively-licensed open source components in Windows. This apparent contradiction is not unusual, it is in fact arguably the norm.
These two factors play an important role in how organizations progress – or do not – towards greater embrace and utilization of open source. Organizations eventually must acknowledge that they have a relationship with open source, if only because they’re consuming it in ever greater amounts. That realization is then immediately followed by a decision tree: fight that adoption? Give quiet approval? Lean into and embrace it? Each decision made with respect to open source is driven by a mix of strategic factors such as the organizational philosophy and DNA and tactical concerns such as whether and how open source may advantage or disadvantage a given business unit. Each of these decisions may lead to events, events which can be mile markers on a journey across the open source maturity spectrum. Consider the following non-exhaustive list of open source-related datapoints for the selected vendor list.
There are several interesting takeaways from this chart, perhaps foremost among them the timeline implied. Some vendors have been actively learning about where and how open source can be best leveraged for nearly three decades. Others have less than three years of experience.
It’s also worth noting that in most cases, organizations start towards one end of the spectrum and gradually, over a period of years, progress towards the other. Some make it all the way to a strategic embrace; most do not. This is understandable for these commercial organizations because open source while offering massive strategic opportunities in achieving widespread distribution and growing community, those often come at the cost of significant challenges from a monetization and business model standpoint.
Which is a perfect opportunity to make clear that the embrace of open source by the commercial organizations depicted on this chart is not altruism. When IBM released the assets that became the Eclipse foundation or promised to invest $1B into the Linux ecosystem, it was as a strategic lever against a competitor in Microsoft. Likewise, when Google donated Kubernetes to a neutral foundation, it was to provide a layer of insulation between running workloads and the underlying cloud primitives of AWS. MCP, PyTorch, Valkey and hundreds of other projects all became open source because their authors believed it to be a strategically advantageous move – not because their authors wanted to do the world a good turn.
With that context, here is one take on the stages of open source adoption for commercial entities. This technically applies to both buyers and sellers of technology alike, but the latter are typically far further down this path than their customers and thus better highlight the spectrum.
These stages do not come with bright lines, and there is the potential for bleed between them. But there are also clear examples for each that can be illustrative.
- Stage 1: Hostility/Indifference: Ballmer-era (~2000) Microsoft’s verbal and legal attacks on Linux specifically and open source more generally
- Stage 2: Silent Consumption: virtually every large company on the planet at this point
- Stage 3: Disclosure: Google’s publication of the Google File System (2003) and MapReduce (2004) papers that ultimately culminated externally in the Hadoop project
- Stage 4: Release: then-Facebook’s 2008 release of the Cassandra assets
- Stage 5: Participation: IBM’s 1998 support for the Apache HTTP server
- Stage 6: Stewardship: Google’s 2015 donation of the Kubernetes project to the CNCF
- Stage 7: Strategic Identity: Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub
None of the stages, notably, require an organization to become pure play open source, because that is an unrealistic goal. What this spectrum denotes instead is a gradual philosophical shift from regarding open source as a threat to useful tool to strategic pillar.
The simplest takeaway from the above is this: open source is a spectrum, and it’s important to understand where your organization – or the organization you’re buying from – sits along it. That position can only be relative, of course, because different parts of the same organization can be at different stops at the same time. But in the aggregate, an organization’s overall place on the open source spectrum is likely to determine their behavior moving forward, whether that’s in the commercial sense or the community, and thus is important to understanding how it will operate moving forward.
Disclosure: AWS, GitHub, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are RedMonk customers. Meta is not currently a customer.
