Open-source technologies will continue to face new challenges in 2025. These include security, sustainability, and funding. New AI initiatives may provide solutions, but the future is uncertain.
Open-source AI development is a growing concern for its ethical and social implications. This includes the possibility of misuse. The open-source AI models are able to be tweaked to remove safety measures, which could lead to harmful applications.
The tensions between vendors and enterprises over OSS use are still present. Vendors are expected to be more transparent about OSS components used in their products by enterprises. OSS governance is managed by organizations independently because there are no mandates.
William Morgan, CEO at Buoyant This year,, the developer behind the Linkerd platform for service mesh, will continue to close, defund, and relicensing open-source project. He believes that open-source projects will be given a renewed emphasis on their commercial viability and sustainability, particularly for critical infrastructure.
“Savvy users ask themselves, how much can they rely on the projects to continue tomorrow?” The resistance to open source being anything but an altruistic collaboration of selfless people will begin to fade as the economic reality of paying maintainers to provide a free product becomes increasingly apparent,” he said to LinuxInsider.
Challenges Signal Open Source Decline in 2025
Morgan’s viewpoint hints that open-source’s structural underpinnings are about to decline. Others who are key supporters of open source enterprise take a similar position on the possible future for open-source.
Ann Schlemmer is CEO of an open-source database company Percona She fears that the open source business model will be a thing of the past by 2025. Her fears stem from an open-source reckoning year, which saw a collective pushback by the community against organizations and practices undermining its fundamental principles.
Two incidents illustrate this pushback. The coordinated launch of an open-source data store Valkey Cloud-based AI search platform makes a decision Elastic Re-adopting the open-source model.
“The open-source community has made vendors aware that they’re still a force worth reckoning with,” Schlemmer said to LinuxInsider.
Schlemmer says that after 2024, the year of the open source strike back, 2025 is the year when open source will cease to be a successful business model. She cites antics like “the open-source bait and switch” — where organizations leverage open-source licensing to drive adoption, only to switch to more restrictive licenses once they want to cash in — as becoming a thing of the past this year.
“As a result of these practices, more people are going to realize that the single-vendor model for popular OSS is a problematic one with fading shelf life. “I believe that moving forward, community-supported initiatives and those supported by foundations or community-supported initiatives will become the standard OS initiative while single-entity OS project will fall out-of-favor,” she predicted.
AI’s Impact on Open Source Definitions
It is important to note that the word “you” means “you”. Open Source Initiative Since decades, GitHub has been the de-facto guardian of everything open source. It is working to maintain a standard definition of open-source AI. Schlemmer, however, observed that, with the recent surge in AI, it has become harder to define what is open source and what is not.
OSI, in response, published its first standardised definition of open-source AI late October. Nevertheless, despite more than two years of research and development — and a growing number of industry endorsements — consensus around the definition still does not exist, she complained.
“That’s why I think we’re just at the start of this complex and difficult pursuit.” In the coming year, I anticipate that we will have more debate and discussion on the subject, with open-source idealists and pragmatists as well as vendors weighing in about what it means to use open-source in the age AI,” Schlemmer stated.
Legacy databases evolve to meet new needs
According to Schlemmer, open-source innovations make legacy database technology better suited to evolving data needs. She argued that unlike many other parts of the tech industry, the database space is still dominated by older technologies with decades of development and use behind them.
“Market leaders like MySQL and PostgreSQL have shown the value of using a trusted, proven tool to manage data. She said that the evolving nature of data and the needs of today’s data layer would require these technologies to evolve.
Schlemmer argues that through community-driven innovation new solutions will be developed with ever-evolving capabilities, integrations, extensions, and versions. By 2025, there will be a constant stream of innovations to meet the changing market needs.
Boom Year for Established Open-Source Ecosystem
Open-source software, components, and their variety have been growing for more than a ten years. Over 90% of organizations use open-source technology in some form.
Schlemmer believes that 2025, with AI’s emergence and the renewed focus on enterprise productivity as its primary drivers will be a watershed for the open-source ecosphere. In its tenth-annual State of the Software Supply Chain, Sonatype According to estimates, the consumption of open-source software is expected to increase by 2024 at the highest rate ever.
The credit for that — at least in part — is due to the growing need for organizations to tighten purse strings and streamline tech stacks. Good news: the number of open-source software projects will increase by around 20% per year between 2022 and 2024.
“Open-source technology in 2025 will mark a significant year, as demand is soaring and innovation is keeping up with it. There’s no sign either of these things are slowing down,” Schlemmer said.
New build tools will reshape development
In the new year, we are seeing the first community involvement in open-source tools for testing and building that is expected to grow. Two companies that are leading this charge share common ground.
One is EngFlow Former Googlers, who developed the open-source tool build system, have founded. Bazel. The open-source Meta version is the other. Buck2.
Helen Altshuler, CEO and cofounder of EngFlow, told LinuxInsider that she sees some interesting developments in open source software as they relate to developer-built systems and remote execution by 2025.
She said that it is something to be aware of in the months and years ahead. Platform engineers and developers are under pressure to create code and test it faster and cheaper than ever before because of the larger code bases due to organic growth, increased open-source use, and AI-generated code. Bazel’s and Buck2’s modern approach to dependency, code hermeticism, and parallelization improves the developer experience, according to Ms. Gomez.
Altshuler remarked that, “while today many open source tools and platforms are hosted and managed by nonprofit foundations, Bazel2 continues to be heavily influenced and controlled by its original corporate sponsors. However, we see a change in this,” Altshuler said.
She expects that this year’s shift will be a greater community-driven approach to both projects. EngFlow’s partnership with Google and other partner within a Bazel Working Group under The Linux Foundation The milestone was significant.
This collaboration included transferring Bazel repositories maintained by the community to the Linux Foundation’s GitHub organisation. bazel-contrib This commitment signals a strong desire to create a community-driven and inclusive ecosystem for Bazel’s development.