In 2025, open-source technology will navigate growing challenges, from security and sustainability to funding. New AI projects may offer solutions, but uncertainty remains.
However, the open-source nature of AI development will continue to fuel concerns about its ethical and social implications, including the potential for misuse. Open-source AI models can be fine-tuned to remove safeguards, potentially leading to harmful applications.
Tensions between enterprises and vendors over transparency regarding OSS usage are lingering. Enterprises want greater transparency from vendors about the OSS components in their products. Without widespread mandates, organizations are left to manage OSS governance and security independently.
According to William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant, the developer of the Linkerd service mesh platform, this year will see the continued closure, defunding, and relicensing of open-source projects. He sees a renewed focus on open source’s sustainability and commercial viability, especially for critical infrastructure projects.
“Savvy adopters ask themselves how much can we truly rely on these projects to be around tomorrow? Finally, the resistance to discussing open source as anything other than an altruistic effort in selfless collaboration will start to erode as the economic realities of paying maintainers for a free product become increasingly obvious,” he told LinuxInsider.
Challenges Signal Open Source Decline in 2025
Morgan’s view hints at a pending decline in open source’s underpinning structure. Other key open-source enterprise supporters take a similar stance on what may lie ahead for the open-source industry.
Ann Schlemmer, CEO of open-source database company Percona, fears that 2025 will signal the decline of open source as a business model. Her concerns stem from a year of reckoning in the open source space, marked by a collective community pushback against organizations and practices that undermine its foundational principles.
Two incidents exemplify this pushback: the coordinated launch of open source data store Valkey and the decision by cloud-based search AI platform Elastic to re-adopt the open source model.
“The open source community has put vendors on notice that they are still very much a force to be reckoned with,” Schlemmer told LinuxInsider.
With 2024 dubbed the year open source struck back, Schlemmer predicts 2025 will be the year open source ceases to gain traction as a 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.
“Because of such practices, more people will realize that single-vendor support for popular OSS projects is an inherently problematic model with a waning shelf-life. Moving forward, I believe community-supported projects and those backed by community or foundation-supported projects will become the standard for OS initiatives while single-entity OS projects will fall out of favor,” she predicted.
AI’s Impact on Open Source Definitions
The Open Source Initiative has been the de facto steward of all things open source for decades. It has been working to uphold a standardized definition of open-source AI. However, Schlemmer observed that with the recent explosion in AI, the waters around what is and isn’t open source have become muddier than ever before.
In response, the OSI published its first standardized definition of open-source AI in 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 is why I believe we’re only at the beginning of this extremely complex and thorny pursuit. In the year ahead, I expect we will see even more discussion and debate around the topic, with open-source idealists, pragmatists, and vendors alike weighing in on what it means to be open source in the age of AI,” Schlemmer said.
Legacy Databases Evolve To Meet New Needs
Open-source innovations will make legacy database technologies better suited for evolving data needs, according to Schlemmer. Unlike many other areas of the tech ecosystem, the database landscape continues to be dominated by legacy technologies, with decades of use and development behind them, she reasoned.
“Market leaders such as MySQL and PostgreSQL continue to show the value of a proven, trustworthy tool when it comes to handling one’s data. However, the changing nature and needs of today’s data layer will necessitate the evolution of these technologies,” she said.
Through community-driven innovation, Schlemmer contends that evolving solutions with new versions, capabilities, extensions, and integrations will be introduced at an ever-increasing rate. In 2025, a stream of such innovations will be introduced to meet the market’s changing needs.
Boom Year for Established Open-Source Ecosystem
The volume, variety, and utilization of open-source software and components have been on the rise for well over a decade. In fact, over 90% of organizations already use at least one form of open-source software in their tech stacks.
With the emergence of AI and a renewed focus on enterprise efficiency acting as the primary drivers, Schlemmer believes 2025 will be a watershed year for the open-source ecosystem. In its tenth annual State of the Software Supply Chain report, Sonatype estimated that 2024 saw the largest single annual increase in open-source software consumption to date.
The credit for that — at least in part — is due to the growing need for organizations to tighten purse strings and streamline tech stacks. The good news is that from 2022 to 2024, the total number of available open-source projects increased by roughly 20% yearly.
“So, with demand soaring, innovation keeping pace, and no real sign of either slowing, I believe in 2025, open-source technology will be a truly momentous year for open source,” Schlemmer predicted.
New Build Tools Will Reshape Development
The new year is seeing the first real community engagement in open-source build and testing tools that are expected to grow. Two companies spearheading this surge have common ground.
One is EngFlow, founded by ex-Googlers who created the open-source build system tool Bazel. The other is Meta’s open-source version, Buck2.
“We see some interesting things on the horizon for open source as it relates to developer build systems and remote execution in 2025,” EngFlow’s CEO and co-founder Helen Altshuler told LinuxInsider.
She added that this is important to watch in the coming months and years. Developers and platform engineers are challenged to build code and test faster and more cost-effectively than ever because of the bigger code bases resulting from organic growth, open-source usage, and increasing AI-generated code. Bazel and Buck2 improve the developer experience with their modern approach to dependency management, code hermeticity, and parallelization, she explained.
“While many open-source tools and platforms today are hosted and governed by neutral nonprofit foundations, Bazel and Buck2 continue to be largely influenced by their original corporate sponsors, but we see that changing,” Altshuler observed.
She anticipates this year will further the shift toward a more extensive community-driven approach for both projects. EngFlow’s collaboration with Google and other partners within a Bazel working group under The Linux Foundation was a significant milestone.
This collaboration included transferring community-maintained Bazel repositories to the Linux Foundation’s GitHub organization, bazel-contrib, signaling a strong commitment to fostering a more inclusive and community-driven ecosystem for Bazel development.
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