How will the future of open source software look like in 2021 and beyond?

Open source software is growing exponentially these days. It gives users the autonomy to develop and modify their work in unique ways, and integrate the work into a larger project or determine a new work based on the original. As it is a type of licensing agreement, organizations like the Apache Software Foundation have supported open source software development that led to new applications and online services. Open source licenses are increasingly being leveraged in the software industry. Thanks to its enhanced capabilities, professionals integrate this software across robotics, biotech, and electronics, among others.

Since organizations whether large or small embrace it, the future of open source will continue to grow.

Analytics Insight accumulated here top open source predictions for 2021.

Growth of Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform. It allows users to deploy cloud-native applications anywhere and manage them effectively everywhere. Kubernetes handles the work of scheduling containers onto a compute cluster and manages the workloads to ensure they run as the user intended. IDC predicts that for open source, the growth of Kubernetes operators to integrate and manage tasks will be essential. These developments will be indispensable as the availability of new application drivers that make adoption easier.

Heightened use of Open Source Software

The use of open source software will witness an incredible surge credited to its control, training, security, and stability capabilities. By using open source, people will have more control over their software. It can help people willing to take a closer look at open source software to become better programmers. As open source code is publicly accessible, students, as well as tech enthusiasts, can easily study it as they learn to make better software.

Supporting Open Source Community Development

Open source projects rely significantly on a collaborative approach. These projects are developed in diverse and geographically dispersed communities that have their own rules, conventions, tools, and processes. As many companies see open source as critical to their business growth, their role in open source community development will be more obvious in the future. IDC noted that companies that support open source should look at how to bolster and make such projects more widely available. This can considerably make a huge impact on how projects get adopted and supported over time.

Open Source to Lead Big Data

In the field of data science, open source software is ubiquitous, enabling the work of nearly every data scientist effectively. Open source projects permeate all levels in the data science world. R and Python are the most popular general-purpose data science programming languages that are themselves open source. As a myriad of open source projects is available in the software world today, most of them never make it onto enterprises' collective radar. However, Hadoop is an exception to pachydermic proportions, powering big data applications at large companies like Yahoo, Facebook, and others.

Skyrocketing Adoption of Linux

Linux is an open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel. This has long been far away from the desktop operating system world. However, Linux has gradually improved its market share in the last few years. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution that involves Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project.