Open source development has risen up massively over the past few years as more and more teams and developers see the fantastic rewards that open source software offers, as the collaborative nature of open-source projects is helping a vast number of developers create and expand on good ideas to create excellent solutions.
In fact, by some estimates, 90% of all businesses and products use at least one open-source component – they may not even be aware that they are using it. But what are the risks of using open source, and what do you get back in return? Read on to find out.
What Is Open Source?
The first question to answer is what open source actually is, which is thankfully quite easy. Open-source software is software that can be accessed and inspected freely, as well as allowing modifications and enhancements, all for free.
Often this is made via community collaboration and then maintained by a number of others, often fracturing off into differing paths. Open-source software can be used with a large number of licenses depending on the creator. LinuxOS, WordPress and Mozilla Firefox are all fantastic examples of open source software that you may use daily.
Being able to manipulate these programs over time and change them to behave exactly as you want is what makes them so great to use, something you can’t do with other programs due to the licenses that they hold.
What Risks Are Involved?
As expected, having your code open to inspection at all times can lead to a number of risks. One of these is that the vulnerabilities of open source dependencies that you use can be compromised if not frequently updated.
This can lead to users with malicious intent finding companies that use dependencies that are compromised and purposely exploiting these issues. Many companies turn to using programs that can rapidly scan through their vulnerability database in order to find any possible problems in order to lower the risk of a weak or vulnerable dependency causing further issues in their solution, and luckily this tends to ensure that any problems can be tackled ahead of time.
Another risk involved with using an open-source dependency is that the dependency itself is not coded by the team that is using it and, sadly, this can lead to a number of issues with less experienced programmers.
Though sub-standard programming practices can lead to a less trustworthy dependency, the real issue comes if the original team stops development and volunteers come in, as a less trustworthy dependency with new, worse developers can lead to a broken system that ends up a detriment to projects that were using it.
This causes issues for large projects that have been using that dependency or library for a while, as it could lead to the project’s team having to develop their own version, possibly slowing down the project’s development.
Many open-source projects are not covered by any warranties, which can cause a number of problems as that means no warranty is covering security, content or support. Though a vast amount of projects are supported and developed continuously by volunteers, they can be dropped at any moment, there is no contract that ensures the dependency you use will be maintained for a specific amount of time. It is possible for a project to be dropped and for your system utilizing that project to be doomed as the support is dropped and the dependency fails.
Are There Rewards?
For anyone who has ever spent time learning to program and developing a solution would know, open source has a vast number of rewards that do outweigh the potential risks. Having access to the thousands of libraries that are open source allow people to easily use working and efficient code for free whenever they need it.
Things like generating random numbers through the decay of nuclear atoms, or designing entire modules for UI elements, are things that would be very difficult to create for each project that needs them. Open source solutions are vital to the world of programming and need to be used, though carefully, to a great extent.
