DailyDirt: Open Source Software In 2016

Open source software (OSS) has been around for several decades now, and it serves as the foundation for many gadgets and online services that consumers use regularly. Google, Facebook, Twitter -- even some Apple devices -- use open source software. There may even be a growing trend to use open source, but proprietary software is never totally going away, folks.

• Open source software gained a lot of ground in 2015 -- with several large tech companies making commitments to embrace open source. Sure, it's all self-serving to attract developers and keep users locked into an ecosystem of services and/or hardware, but it's still nice to see more open source projects, right? [url]
• Microsoft open sourced .NET in 2014, and now it's following the trend of open sourcing machine learning tools by making the Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit available to anyone who wants to work with it. We've seen Google, Facebook, OpenAI and others doing similar things, and Apple looks like it might be one of the last holdouts for releasing open source AI tools (but it's probably just keeping its strategy of building proprietary software on top of open source projects, such as IBM does, too). [url]
• In the last five years, more dollars have been invested in open source software companies than in the previous five years -- by about ten times. Obviously, this factoid also correlates with rising tech bubble, but it could also mean some notable open source IPOs are on the way that could encourage even more open source business models. [url]

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