Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft – These are the most famous of all companies that are creating proprietary software on a continuous basis. But did you know that these and many more companies are completely open source dependent?

What is open source software actually?

Open source software is computer software that is published and released under an open license with a copyright that allows users to use, view, change and often redistribute the software.

Open source software is typically developed by communities anybody can join on online code platforms like GitHub, GitLab and many more. That is why open source software is often independent of a person or company, making it decentralized.

If you want to learn more about open source projects, check out this site: Open Source Guides | Learn how to launch and grow your project.

Open source projects: The engine of proprietary software

Almost all proprietary products use open source libraries or tools behind the scenes. One of the best examples is the JavaScript NPM package colors.js. With almost 23 million downloads per week, 19,000 projects depending on it directly and 4.7 million GitHub projects using the library, it is also used by AWS and Heroku for their software.

Another good example is Linux. The open source operating system created by the student Linus Torvalds in 1991 is now used to host 40% of all websites whose operating system we know.

Without open source software, companies would have to spend much more money to develop the software they currently use for free too.

FOSS, the preferred software among users

FOSS (the acronym for: free open source software) is preferred among computer users when they have to choose between proprietary and open source software. Here are six reasons why:

1. Affordability: You don’t have to pay anything for it.
2. Trustworthiness: The open source code doesn’t contain unwanted trackers, malware and other functionalities endangering your privacy, data and operating system. As Linus Torvalds put in:
3. Security: Because the software is being developed and used by large communities, there is always someone working on fixing security problems. In communities, security issues are often fixed faster and the users can enjoy really secure software.
4. Support: If anybody reports an issue or has questions, the community can help and answer those questions much faster than a support team from a company can.
5. Innovation: Free open source software is typically innovative and offers users possibilities they wouldn’t have with proprietary software.
6. Stability: Because there is no pressure to release features in a short time, the source code is cleaner and the software has fewer bugs, making the user experience by far better.

   In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.
   — Linus Torvalds

Risks of using open source projects as the basis in proprietary software

While normal consumers will not face any risks when using FOSS, companies using FOSS for commercial projects do take a few risks.

This can sometimes be problematic, as it was the case with colors.js. Its maintainer sabotaged the packages, so they couldn’t be used any more. As a result, millions of projects including commercial ones did not work  any longer.

Another difficulty is the license. If the author changes the license from a non-restrictive to a restrictive one, companies have to switch to a new software or pay for a commercial license.

Currently, the Chef license change is attracting the attention of the whole IT world and causing many problems. Chef is one of the first automation software products running on lots of servers with a lot of configuration at the base. Since April 2019, Chef can’t be used for commercial purposes any more. This is why many admins now have to migrate to other solutions, which means a lot of additional work.

The last challenge I want to mention here is the one of discontinued projects. If the maintainers don’t have enough time to work on their project and to manage it, the software gets unstable, has bugs and there are no new releases. This will be the end of the project, and all other projects depending on it have to switch to an alternative early enough.

Conclusion

The IT world would not be as modern and innovative as it is without this huge number of people spending part of their free time to create awesome software. In my opinion, you should accept it when large companies use your software for their commercial products because you have assumed the responsibility yourself.

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
— Linus Torvalds

This is also the reason PickwickSoft will continue to build open source software!