Linux and Open Source Lead New Era of Software Development

Jonathan MathewsPublic

Al Gillen OSLS

With the rapid growth of virtualized infrastructure and containerization, open source software and especially Linux are leading the way into a new era of software development. That was the message Al Gillen, vice president of the software and open source group at IDC, told the crowd at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe in February. In his talk, Gillen charted the growth of Linux and other open source initiatives from 2001 to the present. The picture his data painted was a positive one for the open source community.

“The future is all about open source, and we see very much open source becoming the standardization layer that enables everything else we do in the industry,” Gillen said.

Linux has seen rapid grown in recent years because the majority of cloud servers being spun up in places like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud are based on Linux, Gillen said. That standardization of infrastructure has led to the environment we’re currently in, where containerization and reusable code are coming into their own.

“The notion of having reusable code segments that are actually truly portable, that’s really great stuff,” Gillen said. “We’re moving to this model where we’ve got more and more platform independence, and that’s wonderful.”

Cloud Native at the Forefront

Gillen said when he and his team speak to IDC’s customers about their future plans, containerization and cloud native applications are at the forefront of their strategy.

“Cloud native apps, they really become the entry point for this new battleground, and we see pretty much every vendor in the industry, if they’re going to be relevant for the next 10 years, they need to have a cloud native strategy,” Gillen said.  “They have to have a way of building the lifecycle for these applications, and they have to make sure they’re able to present opportunities for these applications to be successful.

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