The Case for Open Source

Turn on your computer.

Inspect the code you’re using to develop your software product.

Imagine all the technologies you’re using.

Now ask yourself — how much of it is open source?

You maybe surprised about the list of things that were created by the open source community: the Firefox web browser; MySQL for data storage and management; GIMP for image manipulation; Lucene/Solr for enterprise level search engines; Jakarta Tomcat as a servlet container; Drupal and WordPress for content management, and the list goes on.

More recently, Facebook and Apple both released their open source language to develop native mobile application with React Native and Swift. These are both amazing, innovative products that will help the development community create inventive and creative apps. We hope for apps that will better society. But this is important — by Facebook and Apple open sourcing their respective languages, this will help deliver the highest quality software to the community.

If you visit Facebook React and Apple Swift’s github page, the numbers are staggering.

Facebook React has 816 contributors, 6709 commits, and 6952 forks.

Apple Swift’s github page has 346 contributors, 38575 commits, and 4278 forks.

If you really think about it, this is pretty amazing. There are hundreds upon hundreds of developers who are committing hundreds, if not thousands, lines of code to a project they don’t specifically own, nor do they even directly work for the company that the project is affiliated with. Amazing.

So what does this all mean? Why would someone go open source vs. proprietary?

Community — As stated earlier, the amount of contributors willing to commit to a project that they are very passionate about can be an enormous boon to the open source community. The amount of people that are willing to write code, code review, and contemplate on the architecture of your software product will continually bring the standard of quality to a higher level. This leads to the next point.

Quality — When you have an army of engineers working on a project, you can generally imagine the type of code review and scrutiny it will endure to make a satisfied community. Also, if the product is software that other developers would use, the community is a great source of user testing. Each developer who has a hand in the open source project will have strong opinions of how the software should be constructed. Naturally, democracy of the group will dictate how the code is created.

*This study is an interesting look at why enterprises choose open projects.

Security — Along the same line the open source community brings quality to a project, it also brings security.

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” — from Linus’ Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux.

In plain English, that quote means the more people who look at your code, the more quickly flaws will be found. So when you have hundreds of contributors working on your code, you can be sure that’s a lot more secure than only a handful of engineers who are working on your project.

Customization — One statistic that we didn’t talk about earlier, in terms of Facebook and Apple’s github number, is the number of forks. The number of forks shows the people taking the code and more than likely, tweaking it to fit their needs more specifically. With proprietary software, this isn’t possible. Usually proprietary software is extremely opinionated on how their software should be used and implemented. It also locks you into this opinion with no way to customize it.

Cost — Last but not least, is the fact that open source software is free. Imagine how much it would cost when the entirety of your software product you are building is built off free software.

An interesting case study example is Netflix. An average cost to user for Netflix’s service is $8 a month. There are many reasons as to why they could be a profitable company while charging such a low cost, but I’m sure a good reason they could be successful is because the overhead for their software development is so low.

So — having so many reasons to use open source, why wouldn’t you?

Kevin So is Technology Director at Level, a purpose-driven digital design firm.