Open source trends for 2025 and beyond

Over the past decades, open source software (OSS) has transformed from being merely a cheaper option into the superior choice for enterprise infrastructure. Now it often provides higher quality, stronger security, better privacy, unparalleled extensibility, and access to innovation compared to proprietary rivals. It is no coincidence that 96% of all software today relies on open source, and large enterprises are increasingly inclined to invest in OSS-based solutions to capitalize on these advantages.

For venture investors like myself, this shift in market preferences represents a significant opportunity to fund the next generation of OSS-based category leaders in enterprise software. And a few notable trends will likely shape how this market area will likely evolve in 2025 and beyond.

Rise of open source AI

The rapid development of foundational large language models, related AI infrastructure, and their applications has ignited debates around the crucial AI challenges. Many of these issues — such as transparency, adaptability, and security — can be addressed through openness. After the initial wave led by closed-source pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic, a new cohort of open source AI models, including Meta’s Llama and Mistral AI, is now raising the tide and boosting the global AI ecosystem.

While debates about the definition of Open Source AI continue, with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) recently publishing its first draft, this ambiguity hasn’t slowed the adoption of modern AI models. However, to maximize their value, enterprises have to customize AI to their specific needs — whether by building tailored AI infrastructure, fine-tuning models on proprietary data sets, or building AI agents for specialized tasks.

Open source is exceptionally well-positioned to address these demands, and the future is going to be open. Each month, new AI infrastructure companies emerge, and the current top AI OSS projects developed by startups (measured by yearly active contributors on GitHub) consist of LangChain, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face, Dify, and Ollama.

What makes the rise of Open Source AI particularly significant is its ability to influence and amplify other open-source trends. AI is generally changing how software is built and consumed, and that has important (mainly positive) consequences for open source. 

Expanding to business application platforms

Historically, open source has thrived in developer-centric areas such as software development tools and infrastructure, including databases. However, over the past two decades, many enterprise suites like ERP and CRM — which began as business applications — have evolved into essential platforms as new application layers have been built on top of them.

Open source is actively capturing the modern enterprise infrastructure and has a strong chance to eventually disrupt closed-source ecosystems of legacy enterprise suite vendors with better alternatives. A great example is Odoo, an open-source ERP platform, which recently raised another funding round at a $5.3 billion valuation and challenges SAP’s dominance in certain niches. New notable players are emerging in similar areas: Twenty offers an open-source enterprise CRM (alternative to Salesforce), Plane provides an open-source project management system (alternative to Jira and Asana), and Cal.com offers a scheduling platform (alternative to Calendly).

The rise of AI agents is accelerating this trend. To succeed at scale, these agents will require extensive customization and close integrations with internal enterprise data sources and workflows (as human employees have), driving the adoption of AI-native, adaptive, open-source business application platforms. 

Mitigating risks in the software supply chain 

With the average software application now relying on over 500 open-source dependencies, software supply chain security has become a critical concern for enterprises. Many OSS projects are developed by unpaid enthusiasts who lack the resources for ongoing maintenance, leading to potential vulnerabilities — as in the case of Apache Log4j. The adoption of AI coding tools, such as GitHub Copilot, will further accelerate code creation, increasing the overall code base and potentially worsening these security challenges.

According to Gartner, the cost of software supply chain attacks is expected to rise from $46 billion in 2023 to $138 billion by 2031. To address these growing risks to IT infrastructure, enterprises will need to adopt next-gen tools that leverage both modern AI and OSS in software composition analysis, vulnerability detection, software bills of materials, alerting, observability, AIOps, and other areas of devops and devsecops.  

Exploring new funding models 

Sustainability remains one of the core challenges for the open-source ecosystem. While some projects can be commercialized — though that poses its own set of challenges — the majority of OSS cannot, and therefore continues to rely on unsustainable, non-profit sources of funding.

In the world of commercial OSS organizations, discussions about the evolution of open-source licenses are set to intensify. Pressured by large cloud vendors, probably a few more tech companies will shift to source-available and other licenses that are not OSI-approved. The rise of AI adds another layer of complexity to these debates, but also boost the established open-core business model, where modern AI-based premium features on top of free OSS code could have much better monetization potential.

For free community-driven OSS, a systemic, sustainable, and efficient funding model is still missing. This gap poses growing risks to the global software infrastructure. However, 2024 has introduced several promising ideas and experiments that may pave the way for viable solutions in 2025.

One such initiative is the Open Source Pledge, which encourages companies to compensate OSS maintainers with at least $2,000 per full-time developer they employ. Another initiative involves index-based, programmatic funding to support the long tail of small but crucial OSS projects.

Finally, a potentially transformative solution for sustainable funding of OSS can be the open source endowment. It’s a financing model that has sustained leading universities for centuries, and the global OSS community have a lot in common with them.

In summary, 2025 promises to be an exciting year for the evolution of open source software. The changes will likely be driven by the increasing and interlinked adoption of AI and OSS across all levels of the enterprise tech stack, alongside the next-gen commercial and non-profit solutions addressing OSS sustainability.

 Konstantin Vinogradov is a London-based general partner at Runa Capital.

—

New Tech Forum provides a venue for technology leaders—including vendors and other outside contributors—to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all inquiries to doug_dineley@foundryco.com.