Biggest Open Source Software Challenges for 2017

With the new year, comes a stream of predictions from all over. Open source software technologies has gained momentum in the IT market for a long time now, given the multitude benefits it has to offer. But along with the perks comes diverse challenges and open sources is encountering a whole lot of them.

In a VMware and Microsoft dominating era when closed-source technology was given more attention, open-source was nowhere close to overtaking the closed-source software market. However, the outbreak of cloud technology, the emergence of new software, and data center services from highly advanced infrastructures has enhanced the value of open-source technology and made it one of the most discussed software in the IT domain.

Although open-source technology is everywhere now, some new challenges have risen. Let's discuss them.

Cloud computing

How can we not expect cloud to be the reason or one of the many challenges. The growth of cloud migration is stupendous and this will continue for the several next years at a growth rate of 19.4 percent, as per reports. But that's a good thing for open-source technologies that support the cloud like OpenStack. But it's not a good news for those who think that the basic purpose of open-source should be only for free users. When clouds are powered by open-source code, the cloud architecture turns down many of the privileges that would be offered while using open-source software.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT challenges for open-source is similar to that of cloud. Most of the IoT devices are powered by open-source code, but that doesn't mean a lot to users with limited ability to make changes to the codes on the IoT devices.

Apple

2016 was definitely a year of surprises and the biggest surprise of them all was when Microsoft joined the Linux foundation. We couldn't imagine this happening but it did. After the partnership, Microsoft made several open-source friendly moves but that doesn't mean the war is over. Apple, the market giant, is very less interested in open-source technology and that ironical because the MacOS is built in part on open-source code derived from BSD. Although Apple publishes certain open-source code, most of its products and platforms are highly proprietary and closed. So with Apple as an highly successful closed-source proprietor, open-source will have a tough competition in the market.