The Developer of the Future
Welcome back to the third instalment of the ‘Developer of the future’ blog series. Today we’re delving into Open-Source software and how it’s prevalence might help shape the developer of the future.
Open-Source v Closed Source
Traditionally the source code for projects has been kept private and organisations have tended to stay away from using open-source technologies in their applications. This however is starting to change.
At Rowe we are seeing an increasing number of public sector organisations favouring the utilisation of open-source software and for good reason.
Open-source software is visible to everyone and often has large communities from all over the world supporting it. This leads to reliable products with great support forums. There is also the freedom from lock-in that open-source software provides. Proprietary software is owned by a vendor and if this is used as part of your core infrastructure it can become increasingly difficult to move to another provider. This leaves you ‘locked-in’ to the vendor and at the mercy of increasing prices and a potential lack of innovation. In addition to all these there is the obvious cost benefit of open-source software as it’s free, but this can also translate into a faster time to market as ideas can be explored cheaply and get off the ground quickly.
As well as utilising open-source software in projects we have also seen a trend in the desire to share the code being produced. For some that results in a few shared repositories between projects while for others the entire source code has been made public.
The trend definitely points towards sharing more and more source code in the future.
Keep a look out for the final blog in the series on Machine Learning.
