- The use of permissive open-source licenses has continued to rise, while usage of copyleft licenses, and the GPL-family in particular, continues to decrease
- North America is expected to capture the largest share
The Open Source Service market is expected to reach a CAGR of 24.2 per cent during the forecast period 2020-2025 as per a report by ResearchAndMarkets. It added that companies can save on operational and implementation costs by using open source solutions.
For revenue generation, vendors in the open-source market are charging for add-ons. Still, even after paying for add-ons and services for security hardening, and help to manage interoperability, these products are usually much cheaper than closed source alternatives.
It added that they offer 24*7 support from vendors to provide services right from consulting to training, implementation, and maintenance. This fulfils the need to solve issues quickly, ensuring optimum efficiency to the customers.
Permissive open-source licenses has continued to rise
The use of permissive open-source licenses has continued to rise, while usage of copyleft licenses, and the GPL-family in particular, continues to decrease. It adds, “Permissible licenses impend minimal restrictions on software users. Software under these licenses can be incorporated into the other proprietary software without disclosing the source code. This newly created software may be distributed, which saves a lot of cost and time and contributes to the growth of the open-source service market.”
As per WhiteSource Software, a provider of security, compliance, and reporting solutions for managing open source components, 67 per cent of open source components have permissive licenses. It is a three per cent rise from last year’s 64 per cent. Only 33 per cent of the top 10 most popular open-source licenses are copyleft, compared to 36 per cent last year and 59 per cent in 2012.
The report added that North America is expected to capture the largest share. It is witnessing growth in the open-source service market due to prominent market players and high adoption rate of new technologies. The increased investment in cloud technology is expected to drive the growth of the open-source service market. The report added that open source is becoming increasingly interdependent, wherein North American developers have long played an essential part in fostering open source development.
It states, “Developers living in the US remain the single largest group of contributors since 2014, the number of open source contributions, according to GitHub’s State of the Octoverse 2019 report. This indicates the increased level of open source adoption across the region, hence its adoption across vendors in the area.”
