Progress announced the early-access release of Progress® MarkLogic® Server 12.
According to the 2024 State of Open Source Report — from Perforce in collaboration with the Open Source Initiative and the Eclipse Foundation — 95% of respondents say that they have increased or maintained their use of open source in 2023 (33% of those significantly so).
Source: Perforce
As for the 5% who reduced their OSS, they were predominantly from early-stage startups. The most significant growth was reported among respondents in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, although all regions expanded open-source adoption.
Databases and data technologies received the most investment among all open-source software categories at 35%.
The next two largest categories are programming languages and frameworks, and cloud and container technologies, both at 31%.
Further analysis of the results revealed that it is particularly large enterprises that are investing in the latter category, while small to mid-sized firms are allocating more to data technologies.
This year, reducing cost is the top reason for choosing open source at 37%, access to functionality to improve development velocity (31%), stable technology with long-term community support (28%), and access to innovations and technologies (27%).
This shift towards cost reduction is a marked shift from previous years when this reason lagged behind those other drivers and probably reflects the economy and global instability.
Challenges
The continued skills shortage and pressurized budgets, leading to less available time and the inevitable focus on prioritizing daily firefighting, are also apparent, with 38% having challenges relating to the team's OSS skills, experience, and proficiency. Only 16% claimed not to lack open-source skills, and that response was predominantly from small organizations with under 100 employees or early-stage startups. 40% also have concerns over the lack of high-level technical support.
Organizations are taking steps to address the lack of skills, whether in-house or with help from third parties. For example, over 45% are investing in internal or external training, 38% are hiring experienced professionals, and almost 29% are hiring external contractors or consultants. Organization size (and budget) probably plays a role here, as 50% of the largest enterprises are outsourcing talent, whereas medium to large organizations prefer to provide internal or external training to address skill gaps.
Dealing with the skills gap cannot happen quickly enough, given some of the other significant challenges the survey reveals. When asked about their biggest open source support problem, 79% cited maintaining security policies and compliance, followed by staying current with updates and patches at 70%.
Open-source security tools could help alleviate some of these problems, but investment in these was only quoted by 15%, with primarily single-digit usage of the most popular open-source security tools.
EOL Software Is Still a Problem
In addition, End of Life (EOL) software is still being used extensively, and this can contribute to security issues. Unsupported EOL software that is not being patched internally or via a third party can create vulnerabilities that hackers can then exploit. 42% admit that maintaining EOL software is challenging.
That said, 40% scan open-source software for vulnerabilities, indicating that the use of open-source software is maturing.
Other examples of maturity include:
■ 37% having experts in different open-source technologies.
■ 29% contribute to open source projects or foundations, and the same percentage develop new open source software in public git repositories.
■ 21% generate software bills of materials (SBOMs).
■ 19% have a legal team familiar with open-source licensing.
So, while there are still some substantial challenges to overcome, it is encouraging to see that there is awareness of these, plus a greater appreciation of how open source has become a mainstream part of technology, increasingly an integral part of how organizations operate.
Industry News
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Akuity announced the launch of KubeVision, a feature within the Akuity Platform.
Couchbase announced Capella Free Tier, a free developer environment designed to empower developers to evaluate and explore products and test new features without time constraints.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced the general availability of AWS Parallel Computing Service, a new managed service that helps customers easily set up and manage high performance computing (HPC) clusters so they can run scientific and engineering workloads at virtually any scale on AWS.
Dell Technologies and Red Hat are bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a foundation model platform built on an AI-optimized operating system that enables users to more seamlessly develop, test and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (gen AI) models, to Dell PowerEdge servers.
Couchbase announced that Couchbase Mobile is generally available with vector search, which makes it possible for customers to offer similarity and hybrid search in their applications on mobile and at the edge.
Seekr announced the launch of SeekrFlow as a complete end-to-end AI platform for training, validating, deploying, and scaling trusted enterprise AI applications through an intuitive and simple to use web user interface (UI).
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. unveiled its innovative Portal designed for both managed security service providers (MSSPs) and distributors.
Couchbase officially launched Capella™ Columnar on AWS, which helps organizations streamline the development of adaptive applications by enabling real-time data analysis alongside operational workloads within a single database platform.
Mend.io unveiled the Mend AppSec Platform, a solution designed to help businesses transform application security programs into proactive programs that reduce application risk.
Elastic announced that it is adding the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) as an option for users to license the free part of the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code that is available under Server Side Public License 1.0 (SSPL 1.0) and Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2).
Progress announced the latest release of Progress® Semaphore™, its metadata management and semantic AI platform.
Elastic, the Search AI Company, announced the Elasticsearch Open Inference API now integrates with Anthropic, providing developers with seamless access to Anthropic’s Claude, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus, directly from their Anthropic account.