It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wise development. It was the age of open-source business foolishness. It was the spring of AI hope. It was the winter of security despair.
The year 2024 saw major advances in Linux and open-source software development. However, it also witnessed some disturbing open-source business moves that raised concerns about its future.
Let’s start with the bad news.
1. Businesses dump open source in search of profits
Company after company abandoned their open-source roots to seek money with prosperity licenses and trademarks.
For all practical purposes, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys’ count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software. But all too often in recent years, once a business has established itself with open source, it dumps its code’s open-source licenses for semi-proprietary licenses such as the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1.
Also: The open-source tools …