Open-source software sees growth across the board

BY JA KU B L E W KO W I C Z

As the use of open-source software (OSS) continues its year-over-year growth, the biggest area for innovation and open-source adoption is now AI.

But the growth of OSS is in every area, relied upon by companies for a wide range of business-critical applications, including d orchestration, and DevOps and SDLC tooling.

According to the 2023 State of Open Source Report from OpenLogic by Perforce Software, 80% of organizations increased their use of open-source software over the last 12 months.

“The big piece here is, the number one reason to use open source is for access to innovation,” said Javier Perez, the chief OSS evangelist and senior director of product management at Per- force and one of the leading authors behind the report

And AI is the new ‘king of the bill’ of OSS, according to the report “The AI overtaking container technology was probably what stuck out the most when looking at the data,” Perez added

Explosion of data an AI driver

The need to juggle and draw insights from rapidly increasing quantities of data has been a driving factor for AI.

“Demand for services powered by AI/ML/DL technologies is exploding,” said Stefano Maffulli, executive director of the Open Source Initiative. “The vast amounts of data these applications ingest give rise to serious implications when it comes to licensing and privacy in this ‘growth at all costs’ era The [OSI] is researching the AI/ML/DL space to help enterprises and individuals get clear definitions of their rights and obligations when it comes to data and AI systems ”

Start a conversation or open your laptop and it doesn’t take long for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model to come up ChatGPT, DALLE-2, and more models are making this a big year for AI adoption While users have to pay for regular use of GPT-3’s offspring mentioned above, the core GPT-3 AI model remains open source There’s even talk about a GPT-4 on the horizon

Despite all of the new players in the open-source AI field, Google’s TensorFlow, which offers a flexible ecosystem o f t o o l s , l i b r a r i e s , a n d c o m m u n i t y resources that lets researchers push the state-of-the-art in ML, is still the most used project.

While this project has been around since 2015, it received some major updates last year, including enhancements to DTensor, the completion of the Keras Optimizer migration, the introduction of an experimental StructuredTensor, a new warm-start embedding utility for Keras, and much more

PostgreSQL tops in OS databases

At the same time that AI is generating and analyzing vast amounts of data, the data is now more commonly going to open-source database technologies

“We’re talking about very large volumes of data that has to have to go somewhere So it will go to Apache Kafka or Apache Spark or Cassandra, some of those technologies that are becoming more and more popular,” Perforce’s Perez said

The three major players in the open-source data technologies field PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB have secured the top three spots over the last several years.

According to OpenLogic’s OSS report, MySQL and PostgreSQL swapped places by a few percentage points and now PostgreSQL is the most used data technology. PostgreSQL has seen the most growth, passing MongoDB last year, and inching out MySQL this year to secure the top spot

M priseDB whose product is based on PostgreSQL said that the database isn’t even used to its full potential today

“It’s easy to use Postgres in 99% availability of SLAs And we help customers get to five-nines of SLA And a lot of people don’t understand or don’t realize that you can do that reliably with Postgres today,” Linster said

“This is the thing that happened with Linux a good while ago Linux started at the print server Then from the print server to the file server, then to the department server, and today it runs everything ” Linster said “Well, the same thing is happening with Postgres.”

Kubernetes, containers see growth

The other areas of open source that have seen considerable growth are Kubernetes and container technologies. The CNCF found that within its community, Kubernetes continues to mature and have the largest contributor base of any project

Kubernetes 1 26 was released at the end of 2022 with many storage improvements, including CSI migration for Azure File and vSphere graduating to stable Users also gained an improved metrics framework extension and Component Health Service Level Indicators to alpha

The maturing technology also had a podium finish by the end of the year Kubernetes usage increased by 5% in the past year, and with about 23% of the votes, it has become the third m o s t - u s e d c l o u d - n a t i v e t e c h n o l o g y, according to OpenLogic’s OSS report Aside from OpenStack, whose usage decreased by 10% compared to the last year, all other cloud-native technologies have seen an increase in the last twelve months.

The report also found that the usage of containers and container technology has grown significantly from 18% to continued on page 19 >