In the last 6 months, a lot of news and attention has been given to open source projects, enterprises open sourcing some of their projects and new product lines as a direct result of acquisitions. like APIary.

In case you missed it, even the New York Times is getting in on open source with two new plugins for Drone.io.

Big Companies are opening up.

In recent news, IBM open sourced their API Gateway. As such, IBM joins a long list of companies continuing to adopt open source into the DNA. This is a major milestone because corporations license their API Gateways. Even Oracle is getting in on the recent shift in the market. Recently, Oracle launched their API Platform Cloud Service.

“Many legacy API Management solutions were originally developed for on-premises-only deployments, which have different security issues, additional installation complexity and frequently were designed as isolated middleware solutions instead of part of a comprehensive and unified PaaS solution” – Amit Zavery, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Platform

Importantly, the new API Platform Cloud Service from Oracle is a combination of Oracle’s API existing capabilities with Apiary. Google bought a similar company when it acquired Apigee for $625 million.

Why API Gateways?

With the growing adoption of sustainable development and microservices, comes the important role of the API Gateway.

The API Gateway is at the heart of the microservices architecture.

In brief, the API Gateway allows developers to securely connect mobile and web applications to business logic through a single entry point into the system. By licensing the gateway, large enterprises create additional revenue streams when developers want to access their ecosystem.

In a seven part series on microservices and APIs, Chris Richardson from Nginx provides an excellent visualiza tion.

What does this mean for developers?

In truth, Open Source is more than just a passing trend or underground phenomenon. For new developers, open source projects offer up the opportunity to gain valuable experience and networking opportunities with more senior developers.

However; contributing to and maintaining an open source project is a lot of work. This is why large tech companies have, historically, sponsored open source projects. Facebook, Google and Apple rank among the top sponsors.

In an article on Tech Republic, researchers estimate that 50% of code that is contributed was during work hours.

As such, paid/sponsored developers are continuing to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Paid developers get the opportunity to develop their technical skills and experience with the code base. This contrasts with volunteers, who contribute in their free time as a side project.

“The ability to work full-time on a project allows paid developers to develop their technical skills and their understanding of the code base to a greater extent than volunteers who usually contribute in their free time.” – Evangelia Berdou

Enterprises win with Open Source

It’s a win for developers and for enterprises. However; there are a few barriers to entry when it comes to understanding the open course landscape. Just to name a few, vague names, potential customer traction and so much more.

As recent as April, the Battery Open-Source Software Index details top Open Source projects and related companies.

Here is a small snippet of just the top 10:

THE BATTERY OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE INDEX Rank Project Name Overall Project Rating Category Sample of Related Companies 1 Linux 100.00 IT Operations Red Hat, Ubuntu 2 Git 31.10 DevOps GitHub, GitLab 3 MySQL 25.23 Data & Analytics Oracle 4 Node.js 22.75 DevOps NodeSource, Rising Stack 5 Docker 22.61 DevOps Docker 6 Hadoop 16.19 Data & Analytics Cloudera, Hortonworks 7 Elasticsearch 15.72 Data & Analytics Elastic 8 Spark 14.99 Data & Analytics Databricks 9 MongoDB 14.68 Data & Analytics MongoDB 10 Selenium 12.81 DevOps Sauce Labs, BrowserStack

Adding to this, Cloudera’s IPO. The IPO met with mixed results from the market, but it is a huge step forward.

We’re excited about Open Source and you should be too. In the next few months, we’re going to be making some really big announcements so stay tuned!