Open source creates and sustains boundless business opportunities. The best part of it all is that the technology will be publicly accessible long after the entity that created the project.
I created the following list to help serve as a guide explaining just how open source creates boundless opportunities and how it sustains them. This article is meant to be welcoming for rookies and experts alike, as well as for the general public.
Notice that there is no explicit mention of any particular project or technology. This is intentional because these guidelines are applicable to any open source project. The true power and selling point for open source is that it is a highly profitable endeavor because it leverages economies of scale to reduce the burden of research & development. These assets then get publicized, which combats wealth inequality by reducing barrier to entry & enriching the public through knowledge sharing.
Remember, open source has nothing to do with technology – it is simply one layer in the onion helping to combat wealth inequality. One final note before the list – open source projects have a very strange symbiosis with malicious actors. While ethical hacking (white hat) is helpful, the often unpredictable wildcard behavior that malicious (black hat) hackers bring serve just as important of a role in increasing a project’s resiliency. Yin and yang are necessary and inevitable – it is up to us as practitioners to educate the public and each other to reduce as much harm as possible.
Opportunities Created By Open Source
A singular project does NOT have to do it all – front facing client, account authentication, load-balancing, infrastructure hosting, application monitoring, data pipelines build-out, data pipeline management, and so on. Instead, it can focus on 1 or a few of the above & ensure that it does them well. Because its open source, other projects can then build upon this foundation to piece together these various functions.
Open source alleviates the burden for 1 organization to exclusively bear the long-term cost of selling & marketing the project. There will always be a need for direct B2B sales. Open source projects simply create a new marketing pipeline that is predominantly autonomous once a minimally viable product is developed. This organic growth works on its own to catch the interest of investors (individual/institutional/governmental), thereby allowing your trusted contributors to focus their resources on quality technical development.
Focusing on narrow scope & functionality allows the project to greatly save on resources & make more effective use of its community members. It allows the project to solicit user feedback quickly, which results in a faster time to value.
Modularity of technology functionality exponentially reduces corruption. Inevitably, when bad actors arise and destructive incidents like a project being infiltrated & overtaken by a private entity occur, aspects of the technology can still be utilized publicly. This allows for new open source spinoffs to be built, which often turn out to be more refined & of higher quality (better security hardening & reducing compute consumption) because they have a rich history of lessons learned.
Diversity of products leads to transparent pricing. Businesses and the public alike can verify for themselves exactly how much compute resources a product requires and compare with similar projects. This especially helps businesses make better estimates on how many people they will need on their staff internally to manage the project, what limitations the project has that may be built internally, and how much businesses offering said services can reasonably charge.
Open source strongly encourages competition & keeps it alive by publicizing the project’s assets – both the technological assets & social assets. When everyone is able to take part of the development process, even if it’s just passively spectating, it leads to a better educated populace and a precariatized aristocracy. Precariatized specifically of another community leveraging the open source ecosystem to create a better product. Precariatizing capitalism ensures more equitable power dynamics. Remember – open source succeeds when solving stakeholder needs. Closed source succeeds by shilling to shareholder greeds.
Open source leads to more resilient products because it allows academic researchers, businesses, independent watchdog groups, anonymous white hat hackers, and the general public to audit the technology without a middleman censoring access to information. It has been proven through countless scientific peer-reviewed studies and ethical hacking conferences like DEFCON that open source projects are far more secure and resilient than their closed source counterparts because they are open source. Open source projects encourage cleaner code, an immutable trail of timestamped changes showing exactly who made what changes, and the option to build on the project for yourself to fit your specific needs. Malicious actors are inevitable – with open source, we can see how they may have executed their nefarious deeds & work to patch it.
Open source allows you to fully try before you buy. Regardless of how complex a project’s technology may be to self-host, it is always better for that option to exist than not. Businesses will create unique services, as well as contribute to other open source projects, that offer dev ops capabilities for the project. At the end of the day, if a project reduces costs, increases productivity, is intuitive to use/manage, and increases transparency of costing, more businesses will want to use it, thereby increasing adoption. Higher adoption of open source projects naturally leads to more contribution to existing open source projects and creation of new ones.
Even if a project may not have every bit of documentation, such as how-to articles demonstrating installation/hosting/initialization and use depending on the user’s needs, businesses can be leveraged that specialize in helping projects create and manage said artifacts. Inevitably, new open source technologies, like automated parsers, will come about that scan open source projects and suggest documentation based on their project’s public commits. In fact, this is a common way LLMs are used. Vulnerability scanners & patch suggestion frameworks already exist for open source projects. More specialized frameworks & projects will emerge to handle these administrative tasks for projects based on the sector that the project resides in.
Open source alleviates the expectation and burden for a handful of businesses to meet the numerous diverse needs of the market. This results in combating against concentrated economic and political power. Decentralization and redistribution of assets (and subsequently wealth) more evenly into public hands. It encourages fluid social systems that are flexible enough to meet needs as they arise. This agility is also rooted in human psychology, which is what strongly differentiates us from others in the animal kingdom. Humans have a unique ability to dynamically build & decommission social systems to fit current needs & iterate upon them, reminiscent of the software development lifecycle following the framework provided by the Agile Manifesto.
Summary
Open source is more than innovation – it's a pathway to a more equitable society. By participating in and advocating for open source, we can collectively reduce wealth inequality, enhance transparency, and drive technological resilience. I urge each reader, whether a tech novice or expert, to actively support and contribute to open source projects. Write and call your government officials asking for their stance on open source. Ask your colleagues what their understanding and views on open source are. Challenge the corporations you have an investment stake in on what their stance is on open source.
Take the discourse on open source – which is entirely about combating wealth inequality – to the mainstream masses through the language of combating wealth inequality. This public engagement is the only way to sustain this vital movement towards a more inclusive and balanced future. Be an activist of the open source community today — every contribution makes a difference.
Thanks again for your time and consideration. I’ll see you in the next one.
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DISCLAIMER: I am not sponsored or influenced in any way, shape, or form by the companies and products mentioned. This is my own original content, with image credits given as appropriate and necessary.
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