Over two decades, the open source community has grown immensely. In 2000, there were a handful of high-profile open source projects and a small number of companies and organizations to help steer the community’s evolution. Today, the global open source ecosystem consists of millions of projects and an equally large and regionally diverse constellation of participants.
Growing global participation in open source software is a testament to the ecosystem’s success. However, the proliferation of open source projects and organizations also raises a vital question: is fragmentation in the open source community impeding its progress?
Earlier this year, the Linux Foundation — the world’s largest open source software foundation — asked the DEEP Centre to examine fragmentation in the open source ecosystem and investigate why it occurs, where it is beneficial, where it is problematic, and what key stakeholders are doing to confront the challenges of fragmentation. The resulting report (also available on the Linux Foundation website) draws on interviews with open source leaders to probe three domains where fragmentation poses challenges: the development of open source solutions, the integration of diverse contributors from various regions of the world, and the governance of open source communities, including the role of foundations in safeguarding critical open source infrastructure.
The key findings from the research are as follows:
1) Fragmentation is a double-edged sword. While open source leaders acknowledge some fragmentation-related challenges in developing open source solutions, they argue that a decentralized ecosystem will always have an inherent degree of fragmentation and duplication. Moreover, the freedom to independently modify open source code produces a diversity of approaches to solving problems and generates superior solutions. While fragmentation can sometimes result in an inefficient allocation of resources, open source leaders caution that efforts to reduce fragmentation could stifle competition and innovation. In other words, solving the fragmentation problem risks killing the open source goose that laid the golden egg.
2) There is considerable heterogeneity in the software landscape when it comes to fragmentation. Ecosystem leaders observe that some domains are highly consolidated while others are highly fragmented. Typically, fragmentation follows a maturity curve where fragmentation is highest in the early stages of a technology’s development and then consolidation increases over time. Examples of consolidated domains include operating systems (Linux), web servers (Apache) and web browsers (Chrome). Fragmented fields include embedded devices, machine learning, and blockchain.
3) The principal downsides of fragmentation include increased costs and complexity for consumers and vendors of open source solutions. Several open source leaders argued that the explosion of projects on GitHub signals an abundance of duplication and risks a diffusion of the community’s resources. For vendors, the proliferation of competing projects places a more significant burden on their capacity to support customers. On the other hand, end users of open source solutions maintain that the proliferation of projects makes it more challenging to identify, test, and deploy suitable code libraries. Fragmentation can also reduce the open source effect of having a large community collaborate around a shared platform or standard. Finally, the most unhealthy or disruptive forks are those implemented for non-technical objectives, specifically for techno-nationalist reasons.
4) Once firmly rooted in the United States and Western Europe, today’s open source community is increasingly global and cosmopolitan. China, for example, has become a significant consumer of and contributor to open source technologies. Not only do nearly 90% of Chinese firms use open source technologies, but Chinese users are also the second most prolific group on GitHub after users from the United States.[1] However, China is not alone. Many emerging economies contain large communities of open source developers, including India, Russia, Korea, and Ukraine. For low-and-middle-income countries, engagement with open source communities is giving rise to new entrepreneurial ventures and accelerating the pace of economic development.
5) Language, culture, and geopolitics remain barriers to participation in open source communities. While open source is flourishing globally, open source project leaders outside of North America point to language, culture, and geopolitics as genuine obstacles to their ability to maximize the participation of talented developers. Although the open source community is increasingly international, several leaders argue that organizations headquartered in the United States have outsized influence in shaping most open source projects. Open source leaders fear that a failure to address diversity and inclusion issues will curtail the open source community’s access to talent and ingenuity.
6) Diversity and inclusion are critical to building a robust open source talent pool. The challenges of integrating different languages and cultures into open source communities are not new problems, and there is considerable confidence in the ecosystem’s capacity to foster global inclusion. However, open source leaders agree that the community can do more to promote global inclusion. For example, interviewees underlined the need to invest in rapid machine translation capabilities for project communications. Leaders also discussed the importance of promoting open source norms, taming the industry’s macho “bro” culture, and fostering professionalism in community dialogues and decision-making.
7) Techno-nationalism poses a severe threat to open source collaboration. Over the past decade, the United States and China have introduced increasingly stringent measures to restrict the transfer of critical innovations beyond national borders. Meanwhile, the war between Russia and Ukraine has heightened geopolitical tensions and made the security of technology supply chains a policy imperative. Numerous interviewees cited evidence that geopolitical tensions have created national or regional silos in global innovation communities. Many open source leaders worry that rising protectionist measures could restrict the distribution of open source code and undermine the community’s unfettered approach to international collaboration.
8) Transparent open source development protocols are the best antidote for techno-nationalism. To counter techno-nationalism, open source communities must alleviate fears that national interests or malicious actors could taint or corrupt open source projects. Ecosystem leaders see reputation frameworks with enhanced peer review and third-party audits as one means to instill trust in the software development process. Interviewees also called for open source foundations and projects to position themselves as impartial actors and neutral homes for collaboration. They argue that establishing neutral, inclusive, and transparent structures for cooperation will not only broaden participation but can also reduce incentives for ecosystem participants to create parallel efforts along national or regional lines.
9) The creation of new open source projects has seen a commensurate increase in the number of new foundations. One empirical study found over one hundred active entities across a wide range of open source projects. Ecosystem leaders say the proliferation of new foundations and initiatives is leading to a growing sense of engagement overload and vendor fatigue, with some enterprises choosing to be more selective about how and where they engage. However, as open source becomes increasingly global, many ecosystem leaders welcome the creation of new open source organizations around the world. For example, stakeholders recognize that some regional or sector-based foundations can more effectively cater to the needs of their unique constituents.
10) Ecosystem leaders want foundations to do more to align open source projects. Open source foundations are reluctant to play a lead role in identifying and championing winning open source projects, arguing that picking winners is a marketplace function. However, leaders do see a need for better project curation and want foundations and other ecosystem participants to make greater efforts to align projects with similar objectives. To accomplish this, foundations need to enlist skilled community managers with the experience and know-how to compel diverse stakeholders to forge alignment around shared goals. Leaders also called for foundations to bring similar projects under a shared umbrella to eliminate duplication, economize on overhead, and reduce so-called “vendor fatigue.”
11) Securing and safeguarding critical open source infrastructure should be a focal point for collaboration. All ecosystem leaders agree that building trust and confidence in open source software and supporting the ongoing maintenance of critical open source infrastructure are urgent imperatives. Decentralized innovation has produced a remarkable tapestry of open source components that have been widely deployed to support the digital economy. However, leaders observe that maintaining these disparate components is a complex challenge that requires a transparent and coordinated approach and a more significant deployment of funding and resources from the principal beneficiaries of open source infrastructure.
12) The need for enhanced collaboration extends to a range of Internet governance issues. Several ecosystem leaders argued that the open source community has not been as influential or assertive in technology policy dialogues as it should be. They maintain that the absence of a coordinated open source response to such issues has left the playing open to domination by larger, better-resourced entities. Many would like joint efforts to advance open source advocacy on Internet governance issues, including cybersecurity, intellectual property, privacy, and anti-trust. Ecosystem leaders say greater alignment on policy issues among open source foundations would be helpful, along with the creation of open source project offices (OSPOs) in the public sector to facilitate engagement.
[1] https://merics.org/en/short-analysis/china-bets-open-source-technologies-boost-domestic-innovation