Open Source, The Ubiquitous Software Innovation Building Block
In less than two decades, open source software has come to dominate the technology landscape across a wide swathe of key software categories, including operating systems, machine learning, databases, web servers, and more. The open source innovation model has evolved to support a rapidly expanding ecosystem and body of practice supplanting traditional technology development, sales, marketing, and management practices. Open source is also increasingly sparking innovation and forming communities to tackle broad industry problems in diverse fields, including agriculture, public health, motion pictures, and telecommunications. Building on the foundational work of Henry Chesbrough, Eric von Hippel, and Yochai Benkler in Open Innovation, hobbyist technology innovation, and peer-based production, this chapter explores the rise to dominance of open source, the market disruption this emergence has created, and how open source is reshaping legacy business practices not only for early-stage innovation but also for later-stage innovation and collaboration, at scale.
