Why open source is good, and you should be doubling down on it

Open source software development is what we're all about here at TRIGO. Why, you ask? Because it's what gets both us and our clients the best results — while staying transparent and ensuring they never have to rely on us if they don't want to. More on that later. But before we dive into the why, let's chat about just what open source technology is and how it has developed in the past few years.

Open source software is a technology where developers can access the source code under an open license. So we can not only use it and further develop it for our clients' solutions, but we can also submit changes and improvements to the original source code — as can the thousands of other developers worldwide who are using the software.

This means that rather than one entity developing the code, you have an entire community behind it — it's a decentralized way of further developing the product. The community decides which changes make sense and should be permanently integrated into the solution. This way of opening up a product's source code to the outside world often ends up in the product being developed more quickly, efficiently and minimizes the risk for everyone. Because all of a sudden, you don't just have a team of 20 developers working on a project; you have 20,000.

This has several advantages for us developers who are implementing it. Things like:

• We can see exactly how the software infrastructure is set up and the quality behind it — before we implement it.
• Open source software often has vast communities behind them, so if any bugs or errors pop up — we always have access to people who can help us figure out the solution, which allows us to fix issues incredibly fast.
• By design, it promotes collaboration, community, and rapid innovation, which means we can always offer our clients the latest and greatest technology backed by the most intelligent developer communities in the world.

Open source is important for a few reasons. In our humble opinion, these are the most significant ones — especially when it comes to developing software as a service:

• It keeps our clients flexible: open source is incredibly flexible. We can easily connect it with your other systems and solutions, which ensures that we build a software solution that can not just perform what it's supposed to do but can always scale with the business. There's nothing more dangerous than a software system that can't scale as quickly as your business grows, which can get in the way of your success.
• It ensures state-of-the-art technology: because open source is backed by such strong communities, it's always up-to-date with the best possible tech stack. Technology is developing faster than ever before, and keeping an overview of everything is honestly not an easy task. So, if you have thousands of developers figuring out the best way of doing things rather than a small team — there's so much more power and speed behind it.
• Clients never have to rely on us: anything we develop has an open source code for our clients. If they're not happy, they can always pick it up and continue developing it themselves. This might seem odd for some, but that's how we operate; transparent, client-focused, and solution-oriented. Some of our clients are short-term, some long, and we're totally fine with that. Transparency and flexibility are a part of our core values and open source software is 100% in line with that.

The amount of open source solutions on the market right now is endless. These are just some of our favorite ones we work with every single day:

• Red Hat OpenShift
• Apache Kafka
• Hasura

Want to find out more about the technology we work with? Feel free to check out our full tech stack here.

Open source is generally more secure compared to closed software for a few reasons. These are the ones we find predominant:

• It's completely transparent: everyone can view the source code when it comes to open source. This means it's incredibly transparent and things are not easily hidden, if something fishy is going on within the code — like hacking or misuse of data — people can spot it quite quickly.
• Ensures control: having access to the code gives both us and our clients maximum transparency as to what the software is doing, where and what data it's storing, and more. Also ensuring that there's no unwanted misuse going on.
• Risk spread: because open source is distributed and not kept at one central location or developed by one central company, person or team — the risk that it will stop being developed sinks, because it's spread amongst thousands of users.
• Quicker security breach detection: since you have so many people working on the code, if there is something fishy going on when it comes to data tracking etc. it will be detected and flagged much quicker. This is why open source is often categorized as more secure.

Are you thinking about making the switch to an open source tech stack or integrating an open source solution but don't have the skills in-house? Drop our CEO David a line and let's chat about your needs at david@trigodev.com.