Why Open Source?

This article is written by Mohammad Eslim, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Kaan Demircan is a Turkish/American living in Istanbul. He is also a big Open Source enthusiast that has always been interested in working on innovative projects. For almost four years he had worked in Red Hat as an Infrastructure Solution Architect working in the META (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) region based in Dubai and Istanbul.

After years and years of developing and producing close source programs and tools, big companies now started a new tactic of going into open source. Why is that? Let’s know about that.

Microsoft has been ever since founded a company that doesn’t deploy open source tools as products, but in the last years they began a new strategy of going into open sourcing. Microsoft is going into a transformation phase where it is not only transforming in technology but their culture as well. The main reason Microsoft is now focusing on open source is due to the studies made that shows that the high percentage of technical people use open source tools. Almost all of technical people actually apply these open sourced tools in their work. Open Source simply became a trend.

However, it’s not only technical people who are interested in open source products but entrepreneurs are as much interested, if not more into them, as technical individuals. Open source is what startups are seriously looking into as well as enterprise companies, and that’s also in reference to many reasonable points the open source products had accomplished over the closed source ones.

Chief Information Officers (CIOs), the company executive responsible for the management, implementation, and usability of information and computer technologies, are now applying open source as a primary software strategy. The numbers actually gives us the information that %40 of the CIOs are going farther into this strategy.

The second important point is that companies who are not already working with some open source products now have the strategy of going into deploying open source tools or product somewhere in their own move towards this motion of change.

Surprisingly, a fascinating number of developers, %60 of the developers statistically, are looking forward to seeing Cloud providers getting more and deeply involved in the new trend of Open Source Software. It’s also remarkable that %90 of the enterprise companies apply open source in some form.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It is licensed as closed source as a platform but open source for the client SDKs.

Azure was where Microsoft started innovation, it’s where they had a Cloud first model that they try to innovate into it first and then go downwards, so literally and metaphorically speaking everything Microsoft creates started with the Cloud, that’s why Azure.

In 2014, Microsoft has made a 180 degree change and that was when Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft. He made that massive change within the culture Microsoft had for long, it was by then that Linux wasn’t despised as an open source but loved because of that same reason!

He said and I quote “Judge us by the actions we taken in the recent past, our actions today and in the future.” Saying so, if a company is going into the right direction and help you towards it then go with it and work with them, don’t let your old thoughts hold you from a great change, and Open Source was that change for Microsoft.

Open Source is a huge change towards a massive development and improved innovation in the near future!

https://youtu.be/CgHbocq0g_A