The last few weeks, we have seen a number of organizations announce they were open-sourcing their technologies – from large companies like Microsoft with its .Net platform, to small startups such as Midokura with its MidoNet technology and most recently, On.Lab with its O.N.O.S. technology. This is on top of Beacon, Floodlight, Ryu, OpenContrail, and a number of others in the networking industry.
As a result, analysts and reporters are constantly asking me what I think regarding their chance of success. Companies are also often asking me my thoughts on whether they should open-source a technology and whether to do it as a separate project or within the sphere of an existing open-source project. Overall, this trend toward open source is very encouraging. Unlike closed-source/proprietary code, open-source licenses allow one to look at the code – to understand the inner workings and spot problems but also to be inspired. The real power of open source is the ability for people to build on top of the original source code.
Read more at SDNCentral.
