Open source
Open Source
What is open source?
- Source code made public and shared
- Anyone can view, use, and modify it
- Much of IT is built on it
Understanding open source breaks the 'build or buy' dichotomy. A large share of business systems is neither written from scratch nor bought as a whole package, but assembled from components that have already been proven. That is why the more important skill in practice is not coding ability but the judgment to choose which components to use. Adopt the login, charting, and payment modules that developers worldwide have refined for years, and your team can spend its time on the problems only your company has.
What really matters is the license. Permissive licenses such as MIT and Apache 2.0 have loose conditions: you can include the code in a commercial product without releasing your source. Copyleft licenses such as GPL and AGPL, on the other hand, require that anything built with that code be released under the same terms. Adding to the confusion are “source available” licenses, which let you read the code but block commercial redistribution. A free program without source is not open source, and conversely, open-source projects that sell paid technical support as commercial distributions are common.
The signs of a usable open-source project are surprisingly simple. Check whether the code has been updated in the past few months, whether maintainers respond to bug reports from users, and whether new versions ship on a regular schedule. Activity over the last 6 months is a far better indicator than the star count. An abandoned library is not free; it is closer to a debt your developers eventually have to take on in full.
The most common mistake in practice is thinking, “It’s free, so let’s skip the legal review.” Teams have put an AGPL-licensed library into a solution delivered to a client, failed the client’s security review, and had to rip that module back out. It is also easy to forget that open source has no vendor to be accountable for it. When a security vulnerability is announced, no sales rep calls to let you know. A company without a parts list and a designated patch owner, recording which libraries it uses and in which versions, can leave the issue unaddressed for six months after the announcement.
Seungtae ParkHands-on AX instructor who teaches AI business development and marketing automation by building real systems
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”Against the backdrop of the free software movement (Richard Stallman’s GNU, 1983) and the success of Linux (1991), the term “open source” was proposed in 1998 and became popular.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, a mid-sized logistics provider with 180 employees. Three people on its control team spent 40 minutes a day compiling dispatch status in Excel, and an outsourced dashboard was quoted at KRW 80 million (≈ US$59,900) and 5 months. When the budget request was rejected, the IT team decided to build one in-house by assembling open-source components.
- Kim, the IT team lead, split the needed features into three parts (charts, login, and an admin screen), filtered for MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses only, and built a table of 7 candidate libraries.
- Ms. Lee from legal pulled one AGPL chart library from the candidates, warning, “The moment we deliver this to a client, we’ll be asked to release our own source too.”
- Two developers spent six weeks assembling it and opened an internal beta. They posted a software bill of materials (SBOM) listing the libraries and versions used on the company wiki, and named Team Lead Kim as the person responsible for maintaining it.
- Three months later, when a security patch was announced for the login library, the wiki list let them confirm the impact within 30 minutes and upgrade the version within two days.
- As a result, development time dropped from 5 months to 7 weeks, and the cost fell from KRW 80 million (≈ US$59,900) for outsourcing to KRW 21 million (≈ US$15,700) including internal labor. The control team’s dispatch-check time went from 40 minutes a day to 5.