The most important long-term trend, and my number #3 for the foreseeable future, is the sponsorship and management of open source software development by users, not vendors. The trend towards ubiquitous digitization is leading users of software to take their software fate into their own hands, establishing informal communities or incorporating as non-profit user consortia to manage the development of the software they need. The Eclipse Foundation has been picking up this trend, supporting it with what they call Industry Working Groups; the Linux Foundation is also supporting this. Open source like this will not remove the need for commercial support, but it will reduce the effects of vendor lock-in, because products that are built on community open source can be switched more easily.
- The 120 Seconds Open Source Pitch
- The Apache Software Foundation is Missing Out
- Classifying Open Source User Consortia
I have visited this topic a few times and expect to revisit it again.
Start over with my #1 open source trend for 2019.
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