How open source changed everything — again

The biggest open source innovations of the decade, from Git and Docker to data science and the cloud.

We’re about to conclude another decade of open source, and what a long, strange trip it has been. Reading back through predictions made in 2009, no one had the foggiest clue that GitHub would change software development forever (and for everyone), or that Microsoft would go from open source pariah to the world’s largest contributor, or a host of other dramatic changes that became the new normal during a decade that was anything but normal.

We are all open sourcerors now as we round out the decade. Let’s look back at some of the most significant open source innovations that got us here.

A cloudy future

Open source was making headlines prior to 2010, of course, but much of the open source news back then was “free software” vs. “open source” religious wars and lawsuits against Linux. To run open source software, you were still calling IT to provision servers (or using a spare that just happened to be sitting under your desk). The cloud changed all that. Suddenly developers didn’t need to get a hall pass from IT to run their open source code. Just as open source freed developers from Purchasing/Legal approval, so too did the cloud shake developers free of the friction inherent in hardware.

It’s Git all the way down

“The biggest thing that happened to open source in the last decade is the introduction by GitHub of the pull request,” declares Tobie Langel. Enabled by cloud, he continues, “GitHub gave open source visibility and lowered the playing field for collaboration by an order of magnitude.” That collaboration was always the heart of the open source promise, but it wasn’t until GitHub unlocked the social aspect of coding that it became real.

Docker and the container revolution

Like version control and Git, containers weren’t newly minted post-2010. In fact, the idea for containers first emerged back in 1979 with chroot (though seeds were planted even earlier). But it was Docker, as Steven Vaughan-Nichols asserts, that really made containers come alive: “Docker, or to be more precise… Docker tech transformed containers from an obscure technology to the mainstay of how software is consumed today. It’s changed Everything.”

Data science becomes mainstream

Big data has always been mostly a dream for “the rest of us” (i.e., companies not Google), and prior to 2010 we saw earnest efforts to make it real. We’ve had data marts since the 1970s, Business Intelligence a bit later, and even saw Roger Magoulas coin the term “big data” in 2005. But none of these really anticipated just how big that data could be, and just how critical data scientists and data engineers would become, until well into the decade that saw Apache Hadoop (created in 2008) come into its own, and then quickly become supplanted by a wave of NoSQL databases and other open source infrastructure.

Today, the infrastructure used to store and stream large volumes of data is mostly open source. Whether modern databases like MongoDB that make it easier to work with unstructured data, or the various tools like Apache Kafka that are used to move data around, open source made modern data science possible, and nearly all of that happened in the last 10 years.

Open source programming languages

Remember when programming languages were closed? The past decade seems to have shut the door on that era forever, with even Apple eventually succumbing to the open source movement and releasing Swift as open source. At the same time, a host of JavaScript frameworks (Node.js, Angular, React, Vue, etc.) came (and sometimes went) in a furiously fecund period of language and framework innovation. Indeed, alongside this world of JavaScript frameworks (becoming bigger than the browsers they were once meant to build for, as Alberto Ruiz suggests), we also saw a bevy of new, lower-level languages arise, like Go, Rust, and WebAssembly.

Curveball of the decade

Interestingly, Microsoft is involved in nearly all of these areas, yet Microsoft started the decade under Steve Ballmer, still fighting the not-so-good fight against open source. Fast forward to 2020, however, and “the Microsoft mutation from being the most fierce anti-open source advocate (“open source is a cancer!”) to being one of [its] biggest contributors” represents a massive change, as Benoit Jacquemont says. Today many developers use open source Visual Studio Code as their code editor, open source TypeScript to build web applications, and GitHub to store their code. Microsoft owns each… Read More.

News Source : https://www.infoworld.com/