Harness and Traceable have entered into a definitive merger agreement, creating an advanced AI-native DevSecOps platform.
As part of DEVOPSdigest's annual list of DevOps predictions, DevOps experts offer predictions on how open source technologies will evolve in 2025.
2025: END OF OPEN SOURCE BUSINESS MODEL
2025 Will Signal the Decline of Open Source as Business Model: 2024 has been a year of reckoning in the open source space, marked by a collective community pushback against organizations and practices that undermine its foundational principles. From Elastic's recent decision to re-adopt the open source model, to the swift, coordinated launch of Valkey, the open source community has put vendors on notice that they are still very much a force to be reckoned with. So, if 2024 was the year that open source struck back, I predict 2025 will be the year that open source ceases to see traction as a business model. Things like "the open-source bait and switch" — where organizations leverage open source licensing to drive adoption, only to switch to more restrictive licenses once they want to cash in — will become a thing of the past. Because of such practices, more people will realize that single-vendor support for popular OSS projects is an inherently problematic model with a waning shelf-life. Moving forward, I believe community-supported projects and those backed by community or foundation-supported projects will become the standard for OS initiatives while single-entity OS projects will fall out of favor.
Ann Schlemmer
CEO, Percona
BILL COMES DUE FOR OPEN SOURCE
Next year will see the continued closure, defunding, and relicensing of open source projects as the bill comes due for projects created in the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era. There will be a renewed focus on sustainability and commercial viability of open source, especially for critical infrastructure projects, as savvy adopters ask themselves: just how much can we truly rely on these projects to be around tomorrow? Finally, the resistance to discussing open source as anything other than an altruistic effort in selfless collaboration will start to erode, as the economic realities of paying maintainers for a free product become increasingly obvious.
William Morgan
CEO, Buoyant
PUSH FOR COMPLIANCE
Global Compliance Push for OSS Responsibility; As the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) in the EU takes effect, vendors worldwide will need to reassess their use of open source software and contribute more to the upstream community. For example, creating Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) for the open source projects they use will help organizations in their compliance efforts. Corporations using open source software will face increased regulatory pressure to act responsibly, conducting due diligence on packages, libraries, and frameworks within their products, and supporting the developers of the open source tools they consume in commercial products.
Christopher Robinson
Chief Security Architect, OpenSSF
OPEN SOURCE DATA LAYER TECHNOLOGIES
Dev teams will increasingly adopt fully open source data layer technologies to power the intelligent data infrastructure their future-looking applications require. Especially when it comes to working with AI projects, the communities behind open source data layer technologies such as Apache Cassandra 5.0 and others have designed the latest versions of those projects with enterprise AI development needs in mind. Where these open source solutions already offered enterprise-grade performance, reliability, scalability, security and efficiency, in 2025 they'll prove more popular than ever for accelerated on-ramp they deliver to AI goals and other data-centric applications.
Anil Inamdar
Global Head of Data Services, NetApp Instaclustr
MORE OPEN SOURCE AI
There will be more AI models coming from open source projects, including companies that support open source initiatives, with the goal of democratizing AI. Open source projects and organizations have been contributing AI models that meet the needs of the industry and are making AI available to everyone, not just to organizations that can afford to pay for it. There will be more companies that will offer both commercial and open source offerings. No one approach will win, just as open source and commercial software models have coexisted in the traditional software world for decades.
David DeSanto
Chief Product Officer, GitLab
DEBATE OVER OPEN SOURCE AI CONTINUES
Despite Dogged Efforts to Define OS AI, Consensus Will Remain Elusive: As the de facto stewards of all things open source, the Open Source Initiative has been working to uphold a standardized definition of the term for decades. However, with the recent explosion in AI, the waters around what is and what isn't open source have become muddier than ever before. In response, in late October, the OSI published its first standardized definition of open source AI. Nevertheless, despite more than two years of research and development — as well as a growing number of industry endorsements — consensus around the definition of open source AI still does not exist. That's why I believe we're still only at the beginning of this extremely complex and thorny pursuit. In the year ahead, I expect we will see even more discussion and debate around the topic, with open source idealists, pragmatists, and vendors alike weighing in on what it means to be open source in the Age of AI.
Ann Schlemmer
CEO, Percona
OPEN SOURCE LLM VS. SUBSCRIPTION-BASED
Open Source LLM vs. Subscription-Based: Who Will Win in 2025? Meta changed the rules of the Large Language Model (LLM) game by open sourcing their model, Llama. Now, Meta is on track to have the most widely deployed chatbot in the world, despite OpenAI's initial leadership with ChatGPT. As the GenAI race heats up and more native artificial intelligence Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) emerge, open source models will continue experiencing exponential growth. ISVs will adopt an open source model like Llama instead of building on top of a model with a licensing fee involved. Ecosystems will form around open source LLMs, and they will gain critical mass.
Ratan Tipirneni
President and CEO, Tigera
Industry News
Endor Labs announced a partnership with GitHub that makes it easier than ever for application security teams and developers to accurately identify and remediate the most serious security vulnerabilities—all without leaving GitHub.
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GitHub announced a wave of new features and enhancements to GitHub Copilot to streamline coding tasks based on an organization’s specific ways of working.
Mirantis launched k0rdent, an open-source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME) that provides a single control point for cloud native applications – on-premises, on public clouds, at the edge – on any infrastructure, anywhere.
Hitachi Vantara announced a new co-engineered solution with Cisco designed for Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.
Onapsis announced Onapsis Control Central for SAP application security testing and custom code security supporting RISE with SAP transformations.
Progress announced its recognition in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
Copado announced comprehensive DevOps support for Salesforce Data Cloud deployments, enabling organizations to streamline the development and deployment of Agentforce solutions.
Appfire announced its acquisition of Flow, an enterprise software product for Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI), from Pluralsight.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced new Infinity Platform capabilities to accelerate zero trust, strengthen threat prevention, reduce complexity, and simplify security operations.
WaveMaker announced the release of WaveMaker AutoCode, an AI-powered plugin for the Figma universe that produces pixel-perfect front-end components with lightning fast accuracy.
DoiT announced the acquisition of PerfectScale, an automated Kubernetes (K8s) optimization and governance platform.
Parasoft earned a top spot as a Leader and Fast Mover in the latest GigaOm Radar Report on API Functional Automated Testing.
Linux Foundation Europe and OpenSSF announced a global joint-initiative to help prepare maintainers, manufacturers, and open source stewards for the implementation of the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and future cybersecurity legislation targeting jurisdictions around the world.