The OSI is committed to partnering with our sponsors such as OpenLogic by Perforce and the Eclipse Foundation, to advance awareness and defend the Open Source definition through projects such as this. The data collected in this survey shines a light on the importance of tracking the evolution of Open Source licenses, especially at a time when those licenses are changing from OSI-approved to proprietary. 

The State of Open Source Survey is vendor-neutral, polling users of and contributors to Open Source software. The resulting report will deliver invaluable insights into the needs, opinions and challenges of organizations using today’s foremost Open Source technologies. 

The OSI is excited to be a part of this collaborative effort. Interested users of Open Source are encouraged to participate in the 2024 State of Open Source Survey.

By Heather Meeker, OSS Capital

Machine learning has been around for a long time. But in late 2022, recent advancements in deep learning and large language models started to change the game and come into the public eye. And people started thinking, “We love Open Source software, so, let’s have Open Source AI, too.” 

But what is Open Source AI? And the answer is: we don’t know yet. 

Machine learning models are not software. Software is written by humans, like me. Machine learning models are trained; they learn on their own automatically, based on the input data provided by humans. When programmers want to fix a computer program, they know what they need: the source code. But if you want to fix a model, you need a lot more: software to train it, data to train it, a plan for training it, and so forth. It is much more complex. And reproducing it exactly ranges from difficult to nearly impossible.

The Open Source Definition, which was made for software, is now in its third decade, and has been a stunning success. There are standard Open Source licenses that everyone uses. Access to source code is a living, working concept that people use every day. But when we try to apply Open Source concepts to AI, we need to first go back to principles.

For something to be “Open Source” it needs to have one overarching quality:  transparency. What if an AI is screening you for a job, or for a medical treatment, or deciding a prison sentence? You want to know how it works. But deep learning models right now are a black box. If you look at the output of a model, it’s impossible to tell how or why the model came up with that output. All you can do is look at the inputs to see if its training was correct. And that’s not nearly as straightforward as looking at source code. 

AI has the potential to greatly benefit our world. Now is the first time in history we’ve had the information and technology to tackle our biggest problems, like climate change, poverty and war. Some people are saying AI will destroy the world, but I think it contributes to the hope of saving the world. 

But first, we need to trust it. And to trust it, it needs to be open and transparent.

As a consumer you should demand that the AI you use is open. As a developer, you should know what rights you have to study and improve AI. As a voter, you should have the right to demand that AI used by the government is open and transparent. 

Without transparency, AI is doomed. AI is potentially so powerful and capable that people are already frightened of it. Without transparency, AI risks going the way of crypto–a technology with great potential that gets shut down by distrust. I hope that we will figure out how to guarantee transparency before that happens, because the problems AI can help us solve are urgent, and I believe we can solve them if we work together. 

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OSI has gathered a group of leaders who will be presenting ideas around the topic of AI and Open Source in our upcoming Deep Dive: Defining Open Source AI Webinar Series. Registration is free and allows you to attend and ask questions at any or all of the sessions taking place between September 26 and October 12, 2023. REGISTER HERE today!

Coming from long backgrounds in Open Source, founders Aleksei Palazhchenko, Peter Zaitsev and Peter Farkas believe that standards and definitions are imperative to the survival of Open Source, which is why FerretDB is a strong supporter of OSI. They also see vendor lock-in as a real danger, one that can result in extremely costly migrations if a user chose to move their data from a proprietary service to an Open Source one. At present, MongoDB is the default choice for document databases, but when it switched from Affero General Public License (AGPL) to Server Side Public License (SSPL) license in 2018, these Open Source veterans felt that the move introduced limits in choice, competition and innovation, and they knew something had to be done about it.

FerretDB was started in 2021 to be an Open Source alternative to MongoDB. The founders support the OSI authority over what is and is not Open Source, and the SSPL license MongoDB moved to is not an OSI-approved license. The SSLP license allows cloud providers to offer MongoDB as a service, but it requires those providers to pay a licensing fee. What may have been designed to protect MongoDB from infrastructure providers who don’t contribute back to the project also limits the user, and can no longer be considered Open Source.

With an allegiance to true Open Source and a commitment to preserving the integrity of Open Source for future generations, FerretDB was established under the OSI-approved Apache 2.0 license. It was built on top of PostgreSQL, an existing Open Source database that has a strong and active community. This choice was made because starting a new database from the ground up could take ten years to build and add the required depth of functionality, not to mention the trust of users.

Additionally, the Document Database Community was created with the aim of getting all document database vendors, experts and users together. The community holds monthly webinars to foster communication and form connections among stakeholders.

“We think that open source is in danger as more and more companies are trying to redefine Open Source, with licenses such as BSL or SSPL,” said Farkas. “We sponsor OSI because we believe that OSI is the point of reference when it comes to the definition of Open Source, and it should stay this way. OSI’s approach is helping to move the industry forward.”

FerretDB is a VC-funded company, so its founders are interested in making a profit through service, support, and as-a-service options But, the product itself will always be free. FerretDB released FerretDB 1.0 earlier this year, the first version which is capable of running MongoDB workloads and supporting MongoDB tools. Features continue to be added based on the requests of the community. FerretDB-as-a-service is available on the European infrastructure provider, Scaleway, as well as on Civo with plans for enterprise-level support in the future.

If you would like to participate in the development of document database standards, you can share your input at www.documentdatabase.org.

Salesforce is a cloud-based software company with applications that help businesses manage customers in every step of the customer journey, from lead to loyalty. The service Salesforce provides its customers is profoundly based on Open Source software from many sources. In 2014, Salesforce donated Open Source Phoenix to Apache (now called Apache Phoenix), and continues to contribute to thousands of Open Source projects every year.

We asked Alyssa Gravelle, Senior Program Manager, Open Source to share the organization’s intrinsic ties to Open Source, its reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and its hopes for the Open Source movement. Here’s what she said:

Open Source has been part of Salesforce from the beginning. As an organization, we know that Open Source drives our industry forward, kick-starts new careers and builds trust in the products we create. From using projects, making improvements and sharing our most impactful innovations with the Open Source community, we get to leave it better than we found it.

We encourage all of our employees to contribute to and use Open Source, from key technologies powering our innovation to community projects that make our world a better place. Open Source is becoming a larger part of our culture at Salesforce. In fact, employees can participate in Open Source projects as a part of our Volunteer Time Off benefit. Volunteering is a core value of the company, and our employees can log up to 56 volunteer hours contributing, as long as the project is philanthropic in nature and is not part of their day job. In 2023, our goal is to log 750 volunteer hours. We have employees volunteering to projects such as Refuge Restrooms, aXe, and Ushahidi, in addition to projects owned by foundations such as the CNCF.

Open Source is also becoming a larger part of our products at Salesforce. It was always core to various initiatives and products, such as Heroku and Mulesoft, and it is now built into Hyperforce and Dataweave. Investing more than ever in Open Source, Salesforce now has a dedicated Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) with support from legal and security, and the OSS Core team, a group of volunteers passionate about Open Source, work to drive the success of Open Source at Salesforce.

There are several other Open Source initiatives Salesforce is focused on:

• Lightning Web Components: Lightning web components are custom HTML elements built using HTML and modern JavaScript released in 2019 with dedicated teams still working on it.

• Dataweave CLI: The DataWeave Language is a simple, powerful tool used to query and transform data inside of Mulesoft. DataWeave supports a variety of transformations: simple one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one mappings from an assortment of data structures, and can complete more elaborate mappings including normalization, grouping, joins, partitioning, pivoting and filtering.

• Buildpacks: Initially used primarily with Heroku, we are proud of the impactful contribution we’ve made with Cloud Native Buildpacks. We are maintainers of the Buildpacks project, which takes application source code and produces a runnable OCI image. The project was contributed to the CNCF Sandbox in 2018 and graduated to Incubation in 2020. For most Heroku users, Buildpacks remove the worry of how to package your application for deployment, and we are expanding our use of Buildpacks internally in conjunction with our Kubernetes-based Hyperforce initiative.

• FOSS Fund: Each quarter Salesforce’s Open Source contributors nominate and vote on a project that is essential to our work at Salesforce. The winning project is awarded $10,000. We started at the beginning of 2020 and have 11 projects we have funded so far. We will continue to support one project per quarter in 2023.
• Internal Open Source Conference: We hosted our second internal Open Source Conference in 2022, with global presentations in both the AMER and APAC time zones. Salesforce will continue to grow this as we focus on providing tools and information to the Open Source community.

Why Salesforce Sponsors OSI

We recognize two main issues facing the Open Source community today. The first is the attempted redefinition and/or dilution of what an Open Source license means. The second is the complexity of tracking and fixing Open Source security related problems.

OSI-certified licenses are known and trusted commodities. As the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), OSI takes a hard stance against Open Source licenses that don’t abide by the OSD, guaranteeing that the rights and freedoms associated with Open Source are maintained and honored. At Salesforce, we recognize the importance of this in keeping Open Source as entrenched and successful as it is. We consider OSI a key partner in the Open Source ecosystem as an impartial “safe-space” for Open Source engagement, education and compliance. OSI’s focus on the security and maintenance of Open Source projects, and its insights and guidance are invaluable.

In the coming year, it would be useful for OSI to extend its focus on the “rank and file” membership; the individual contributor in Open Source. Companies and organizations have plenty of foundations which empower their voices and reach, but very, very few Open Source foundations focus on the community of people, which serve as the life-blood and catalysts for innovative Open Source. In the words of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax: “Who speaks for the trees?” OSI should be one of the loudest and clearest voices for the individual community.

Today, developers are increasingly building their cloud-native, microservice-based applications within numerous containers, each of which can become bloated with vulnerabilities over the course of development and therefore pose a security risk upon deployment. To bring awareness to this issue, Slim.AI has produced for the last two years its research on what’s inside the most commonly used public containers. According to the 2022 Container Report, the number of vulnerabilities in public containers is increasing: 60% of the top public containers have more vulnerabilities than they did a year ago. In fact, today’s average public container has 287 vulnerabilities, 30% of which belong to a high/critical category, up from 20% last year.

Many companies and governments are demanding a world with zero vulnerabilities, but Slim.AI’s research reveals just how out of reach that goal is given current awareness, tools and techniques. As described in the 2022 Container Report, “Among executives, 49% in our survey think containers are slimmed and hardened, but those who do the actual work, the front-line engineers and managers, report significantly lower numbers. Our survey found that 88% of developers admit it is challenging to remove vulnerabilities. Moreover, less than 26% say they understand how to slim and harden containers.”

Until now, creating production-ready containers—containers that are optimized for both performance and security—has required expertise, time and manual work that many developers are unwilling or unable to commit. SlimToolkit is one of several new Open Source resources that can help take this heavy burden off of the shoulders of developers. It provides automation tools for developers to build, manage, and ship production-ready containers effectively and efficiently—as they’re being built. SlimToolkit empowers developers to build and test their cloud-native applications securely, shipping only what is needed to production.

SlimToolkit is an Open Source Success Story

SlimToolkit (previously known as DockerSlim and licensed under an Apache 2.0 license) is a story of an Open Source project with steady and organic growth. It began as a winning project in the 2015 Docker Global Hack Day in Seattle and has built a grassroots community that has expanded by word-of-mouth referrals. Users became contributors, expanding features and functions as they adapted it to meet their needs, in true Open Source fashion. Now with over 16k stars on Github and 500k+ downloads, SlimToolkit is a free way to ensure the safest possible software is shipped to production.

One of the goals for SlimToolkit in 2023 is to move the project closer to the CNCF ecosystem, first by submitting it as a Sandbox project and then by pursuing Incubation status. 

“Containers are a fundamental component of the modern cloud-native stack and SlimToolkit empowers developers at all levels to build production-ready cloud-native applications faster and with less effort,” said Slim.AI co-founder and DockerSlim creator Kyle Quest. The Open Source community transformed code that was written in 2015 into a tool that can play an integral role in securing the software supply chain. As a company, Slim.AI is more committed than ever to contributing to and engaging the Open Source community in making the changes and improvements to SlimToolkit to benefit all.

Slim.AI invites anyone to peruse the How-to and READme files, and check out and contribute to the SlimToolkit community.

Nearly all educational institutions use learning management systems that teachers and students access to manage all the components of classes or programs such as assignments, grades, and lesson plans. Integration with learning management systems is important for the success of an online learning platform, and BigBlueButton is built into the core of some of the most popular options like Moodle, Canvas, Schoology, and D2L.

When COVID-19 hit, global adoption of BigBlueButton skyrocketed and Blindside Network hosting grew 60x over the course of six months. Even teachers who were resistant to online learning had no choice but to adjust to virtual classrooms, and it became evident that a platform designed specifically for the needs of teachers and students would deliver a higher quality experience. Being Open Source is essential for many of BigBlueButton’s global users who follow GDPR for data privacy and digital sovereignty. For example, the French Ministry of Education deploys BigBlueButton through the entire school system, serving 500,000 concurrent teachers and students. And over 70 universities in Germany use BigBlueButton. The collaborative benefits of creating BigBlueButton as Open Source has grown the accessibility of the platform to over 55 languages.

“Access to quality education is a global problem, and the only way to solve this problem is through Open Source,” said Fred Dixon, Co-Founder and CEO of Blindside Networks. “It is one of the most important things we can do for the next generation.”

A mantra at Blindside Networks is that the goal in a virtual classroom is not to meet but to learn. BigBlueButton allows teachers to engage students. Analytics are collected and assessed to help teachers gauge participation and identify struggling students. Teachers can adapt lessons in real-time based on feedback the platform gives them. This Open Source platform also opens up educational opportunities to students all over the world who may not have local access to schools.

Blindside Networks believes whole-heartedly in sponsoring OSI, and has done so for many years. It sees OSI as a respected advocate and supporter fostering growth in Open Source communities and projects.

BigBlueButton, with its built-in tools for engagement, can be embedded into other Open Source projects that take its potential value far beyond video conferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet. Blindside Networks is there to provide commercial support and hosting if needed. Developers who are curious about it are encouraged to visit bigbluebutton.org or watch a demo at demo.bigbluebutton.org.

DataStax delivers a unified stack, available on any cloud, helping enterprises mobilize real-time data and quickly build the smart, high-scale applications required to become data-driven businesses. DataStax is focused on making Cassandra the top choice for modern cloud-native apps and expanding the ecosystem around Cassandra.

Though it’s been in existence for 14-plus years, the large and vibrant community supporting Cassandra has consistently been working to improve it. In fact, Cassandra is used by 90% of the Fortune 100. As the volume of data explodes in this new age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), organizations need a database that has maturity, reliability and scalability. Cassandra fits that bill.

Over the last ten years, data has exploded with trends such as mobile first, user-centric, and big data. With that, new disciplines like analytics and data science have emerged. Real-time transactional data brings value beyond business insights. Data must come back into the application platform, and ML models need to come back into the transactional space. This is the advent of Soft-AI.

The Cassandra community has always prioritized scalability and reliability, and that takes time to do properly. Cassandra has passed through a maturing phase, and the release of 4.0 last year, the newly released 4.1, and the 5.0 release scheduled for Spring 2023, reflect that. The Cassandra community is Open Source at its best as a melting pot for multiple vendors and multiple commercial participants to come together for collaboration with a strong sense of trust and tight Continuous Integration (CI) system. The community has committed to making yearly major releases, and every .0 release will be ready for production for users of every size.

DataStax is tightly connected to Cassandra, offering a cloud service built on Cassandra and Stargate, an Open Source data gateway that gives application developers the freedom to build real-time applications for Cassandra, using the API of their choice. DataStax also works on K8ssandra, a complete Cassandra Kubernetes ecosystem.

Cassandra deploys 50,000 tests for every commit to ensure data does not get lost. Testing and QA was a primary focus for the 4.0 release. The recent GA 4.1 release has new operator safety features and an advanced ecosystem to meet modern data demands. New features of Cassandra 4.1 include:

• Paxos v2
• Guardrails
• CQL (Native Protocol) Rate Limiting
• Client-side Password Hashing
• Partition Denylist
• Lots of CQL improvements
• Pluggability: Memtable Encryption, Authentication

If you’d like to get involved with Cassandra—or just learn more about this powerful, Open Source database, DataStax is hosting Cassandra Forward, a free, online event on March 14. Registration is open now!

By Mike Linksvayer, Head of Developer Policy at GitHub

The drive to build AI and radically accelerate human progress is a thread through the history of computing. It’s no coincidence that free software was founded by an AI lab developer and the term open source was coined by the leader of an AI and nanotech think tank. While “AI” has had ups and downs, and changing definitions, it’s now clear that the deep learning revolution of the last decade will be transformative–either merely as Software 2.0, or as something much more. GitHub is sponsoring Open Source Initiative’s Deep Dive: AI because we think it’s important for the community to unpack how open source software, process, and principles can help best deliver on the promise of AI. 

Open [source] is at the core of AI development

Open source is an essential driver of AI development in three ways. First, the leading AI tools are all open source. Open source frameworks like PyTorch are ubiquitous infrastructure for training AI systems. Similarly, open source software provides essential tools for responsible AI development, enabling developers to increase transparency of AI systems with packages like InterpretML and measure bias with toolkits like AIF360. 

Second, open source collaboration provides a roadmap for developers to build AI systems. 

We’re witnessing a proliferation of trained machine learning models placed into the commons under open source and other public licenses. This enables developers to use, train, modify, and redistribute models for their own purposes, building an AI development process that looks like the open source library and package ecosystems that underpin modern software development. Many of these projects are setting norms for how communities can collaboratively build AI. From a license perspective, this is yielding diverse results. EleutherAI is using open source licenses for their tooling and models. Others are releasing AI models under licenses that may give any user permission to use, modify, and share the models–so long as they avoid uses the authors deem unethical in the license.

Third, free and open source software has inspired similar open movements in critical related areas, such as open access, open data, and free culture, to produce an “information commons”. These movements are foundational drivers for the democratization of AI, evidenced by the ubiquity of Wikipedia and scraped datasets such as Common Crawl and the Pile for training AI models. Without the information commons created by these open movements through a mix of norms, practices, legal affordances, and of course community, the development of AI would have been both slower and more limited to only the largest entities with proprietary data.

AI will become core to [open source] software development

AI is changing how software gets made. Seemingly every week, developers are encountering new AI-powered tools that may transform how software is built and maintained. Chief among these are code generation systems that act as pair programmers for developers, helping them to write code faster. In the past year since we’ve launched GitHub Copilot, others have also released AI systems for code generation, such as Amazon, Carnegie Mellon, DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI, Replit, Salesforce, and others. Such systems do, or will soon, not only aid programmers in the generation of new code (especially necessary but painful boilerplate and tests), but also code documentation, and translations from one programming language to another. The promise of AI-powered developer tools to reduce programmer drudgery is high.

AI also holds promise to expand developer capabilities and opportunities in multiple dimensions: make it feasible for more developers to use advanced tools (like formal methods), enable more people to be developers (lowering barriers to writing useful code, accelerating learning), and increase software quality while decreasing its cost, which will increase the overall opportunity and demand for developers (as open source has done for decades).

AI itself presents new challenges to software correctness and supply chain security due to the relative opacity and complexity of AI models. We can expect an explosion of use of AI models as dependencies, raising novel questions for software supply chain security and provenance. To use AI responsibly we will have to import learnings from and investments made in securing the traditional software ecosystem—global, open collaboration among developers, security researchers, and all of society (each in turn assisted by AI tools) will be essential to manage AI risks and drive alignment with human progress.

Towards strong community stewardship for open source and AI

Developers may be at an inflection point similar to the advent of the web. Open source development accelerated with the web as libraries, code, and practices were more readily available, but also raised questions in FOSS communities about user autonomy and transparency as code switched from distribution to service. AI may constitute another shift in the economics of software, one which prompts free software and open source activists to expand their policy ambitions from protecting privately created regulatory carve-outs (copyright licenses) to include advocacy around public regulation.

Both as the steward of the Open Source Definition, and as a focal point for metadiscourse on open source, the Open Source Initiative is uniquely positioned to lead a conversation on how the future of AI can embody the spirit of open.

One fundamental question: what does it mean for an AI system to be open source? For example, can a pretrained model ever be its own preferred form for modification? Or, what is the minimum set of precursors that need to be under an open source license for the model to be open source? How should training sets that contain personal or other sensitive data be handled in the context of producing an open source model? These questions will inform and be informed by not only what existing and new open source communities do, but also public policy—for example, drafts of the EU AI Act invoke open source AI systems, even though there is no settled definition of what open source AI is.

Another set of fundamental questions concern how open source AI projects are governed and what role open source plays in AI governance: at what layers (e.g., technical, community norms, standards, legal, public policy), with what methods, and whether differing approaches can be complementary or by necessity limit collaboration or interoperability across projects.

Finally, questions about the macro impacts of AI, from labor to geopolitics, and the role that open source can play in shaping good macro outcomes, are essential. How, for example, might global open collaboration on AI reduce the risks of runaway military competition or technological surprise, while increasing the benefit of using AI to spur innovations that will help address global challenges such as climate change?

Open source collaboration has grown from the small scale of individual labs, to a global and largely informal community, to an ecosystem that also includes huge corporate investment and that powers much of society’s critical infrastructure. This scaling continues to accelerate as governments become key players in open source, and as AI massively expands the role that software will play in society. The latter—AI—is a good prompt for the open source community to ask challenging questions, many of which were already bubbling under the surface, resulting from the increased surface area and criticality of open source and software with all sectors of society, and all parts of the world.

We’re excited that OSI is stepping up to the challenge of engaging in such important and deep questions that go far beyond the initial practical context of open source—yet were always there in aspiration. We’re looking forward to contributing to and following the Deep Dive: AI conversation, and encourage everyone to join in.

Atlantic.Net is a multi-stream cloud hosting and managed service provider headquartered in Orlando, Florida with locations in the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In business for almost 30 years, Atlantic.Net operates globally serving clients in over 100 countries, with millions of servers deployed across seven global data centers. Atlantic.Net’s cloud infrastructure platform includes Virtual Private Servers (VPS), dedicated and bare-metal hosting, including compliance hosting backed with a wide range of managed services, with technical support available 24/7.

We asked Marty Puranik, Founder and CEO of Atlantic.Net to share the organization’s intrinsic ties to Open Source, its reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and its hopes for the Open Source movement. Here’s what he said:

Open Source underpins a wide range of services on the Atlantic.Net cloud. Customers can choose from a diverse selection of Linux and Unix operating systems such as Fedora, FreeBSD, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, Rocky Linux, CentOS, and Arch Linux. The development and orchestration of its own cloud is built by Atlantic.Net engineers using Ubuntu, KVM, and many other proprietary solutions.

Popular Open Source applications, operating systems, and application middleware are available on Atlantic.Net’s ACP console. The flexibility of the ACP Cloud empowers users to experiment and consume resources on-demand. An extensive library of procedures and documentation is available covering a wide range of Open Source applications, operating systems, and services. Users can choose from templates of highly secured and reliable software images, including preconfigured LAMP and LEMP stacks, WordPress, NodeJS, Docker, and MySQL instances.

Not only is Open Source foundational to Atlantic.Net’s infrastructure and services, since its inception in the early 90s, Atlantic.Net has supported grass-roots open source technology initiatives. Some of these include:

• Word Camps: Open-Source WordPress conferences hosted in Orlando, Tampa, and Seattle
• Bar Camps: Conferences for open-source technologies like Ruby, PHP, Java, and
• Florida Linux Alliance: Sponsorship provided for a local collection of Linux experts
• Drupal.org: Atlantic.net provides hosting services for the Drupal, the popular open-source content management system (CMS)
• Ubuntu Summit: An annual online event that showcases the very best of Ubuntu, the open-source Linux distribution.
• DotNetNuke: The largest online .NET community that focuses on the development and maintenance of the open-source DNN platform content management system and application framework.

To see a complete list of supported organizations, visit the Community Involvement section on our website.

Atlantic.Net  is proud to sponsor and contribute to the Open Source Initiative. OSI’s Open Standards are a model for the exacting standards Atlantic.Net strives to create for its customers. As a commitment to the open source community, Atlantic.Net is offering a free-to-use server for one full year and offers plans to help start projects with little to no cost.

Atlantic.Net looks forward to being a part of the growth of OSI in coming years.

We asked Open Weaver to share the organization’s intrinsic ties to Open Source, its reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and its hopes for the Open Source movement. Here’s what they said:

Open Weaver believes Open Source software is central to the future of digital innovation. We are already enabling developers to develop applications faster by reusing Open Source, and there is a significant opportunity to accelerate digital innovation through it.

There are three core benefits to Open Source we see as key to that innovation:

1. Open Source is the best codification of the world’s technology knowledge that is available to the public today.
2. Open Source significantly reduces risk by enabling developer participation in the roadmap.
3. Open Source accelerates diverse innovation through democratizing development across global developers.

The Open Source Initiative plays a defining role in bringing together Open Source advocacy, education, and governance that are critical in the growth of Open Source. Organizations derive significant benefits by consuming Open Source software, and contributing back to the Open Source community is critical to nurturing the long-term benefits and innovation made possible through Open Source.

Open Weaver is a sponsor of OSI and we encourage organizations that also use Open Source to support OSI and its mission to educate about and advocate for the benefits of Open Source. We look forward to collectively making Open Source software easier to find and reuse in 2022.