Why Do Companies Choose Open-Source Technology for Their Tech Stack?
When companies choose their tech stack solutions, they have to commit their whole organizations. It’s important to ensure the scalability, security, and cost-efficiency that is so important for growth.
That’s a big decision that requires thorough consideration and planning. When management chooses the wrong technologies, enterprises are likely to experience less flexibility and end up having to do a significant amount of refactoring.
In the past 20 years, enterprise-level open-source software has grown in popularity. As more and more companies are discovering the benefits of these solutions, their adoption continues to grow. Any enterprise that is considering making modifications to their tech stack should, at the very least, consider the advantages of open source software.
If you’re not convinced, here are some reasons why larger organizations use these technologies as the core of their operations.
Financial Advantages
From a cost perspective, open source software offers a significant opportunity for savings. Open source software does not have a license fee and enterprises can deploy as many instances as they may require. Note that customers may decide to choose a managed service so that they can leverage the expertise of a third party when it comes to support and maintenance inside their environment.
Total cost of ownership must also take into account compute power, headcount, integration within the existing technical infrastructure, etc. Thus the financial advantage cannot be made in a vacuum – a variety of factors must be considered. But regardless, eliminating the licensing fees with open-source typically results in a significant cost benefit relative to proprietary software offerings.
They can avoid vendor lock-in
Using a single proprietary technology for your tech stack infrastructure increases the chances of being locked in by that technology or the vendor. In cloud computing, vendor lock-in puts full dependence on one vendor, which can prove extremely risky as the technical roadmap can shift suddenly with innovation.
Lack of workforce expertise, financial difficulties, expensive switches, and closed-off services could “lock-in” your business with a single vendor you’re not satisfied with. Simply put, software providers are incented to make it difficult for their customers to switch to something else.
With open-source software, there’s no risk of being held hostage. These solutions are flexible and give you the freedom to set up your operations the way you want. At the same time, there are no limitations in terms of services you can use or combine in your workflow.
Open-source solutions have great communities
The majority of open-source software designed to be used on an enterprise-level have large communities. These communities are always looking to share their experiences with the solution, improve it, share new ideas, and build support for it.
With this kind of environment, both the community and the enterprises benefit. Even the mentality is different than with people using proprietary solutions. It’s about sharing knowledge and improving capabilities to deliver more effective, better, and faster results.
Simply put, it’s not just about the outcome your team has delivered. You can tap into the whole community to find interesting ideas, perform troubleshooting, find solutions to problems, and look for different development processes.
Not only does this help organizations understand how they use a particular piece of software, but they can also find quick answers to problems that someone else has already solved. Furthermore, becoming a part of a large community makes it easier to network and even find people who would be “the right fit” for your organization.
Better security & robust performance
The power of an open-source community stretches much further than just getting instant answers to your problems. When a software’s code is available to everyone, it means that it has been vetted and reviewed many times.
Users can discover security issues, bugs, and security limitations and point them out to the community. All the liabilities are recognized and patched up quicker than with proprietary solutions.
The essence of this kind of software is transparency and letting everyone improve it in any way possible, including security. On top of that, companies that use the solution and recognize that they can improve it to be more secure can do this independently without relying on anyone else.
Ability to develop innovative solutions
Innovation is much faster in an open-source environment. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, the nature of open-source solutions is that anyone can look at the code at any time, understand its design, make customizations, and set up the solution to support their innovative ideas.
Proprietary software vendors usually limit users to what they can do with their solution, and that’s often the barrier that stops innovation. Another reason for this is that open-source platforms come with hundreds of other similar products that can be used within that environment.
Simply put, there are solutions that you can add or use for free as well to deal with lots of issues. It lets companies innovate faster and test out various options. The third major reason is that open-source systems often have open APIs meaning that teams can integrate any third-party solution for innovation.
Conclusion
Using open source technology allows users to customize software to their liking, avoids vendor lock-in, ensures security, and so much more! That’s why at Pandio, we’re proud to use and give back to the open source community.
Open-source is the future. The whole movement is growing as companies are adopting these solutions for both commercial and non-commercial use. According to a recent survey by The Linux Foundation, 72% of companies are using open source for internal use and 55% are leveraging it in their commercial products. Based on the conversations we are having every day with customers, this trend is gaining momentum and should continue to grow.