Why Enterprises Are Betting on Open Source
Open source has moved from an option to an imperative for enterprises. As Comcast Open Source Program Manager Shilla Saebi put it: “If we’re not participating, we’re going to be left behind.” GitHub has observed steady growth in enterprise investment in open source, and a recent Red Hat report confirms that most enterprises increased their open source usage in the past year, with more than half planning further growth.
Here are the five core drivers behind that investment.
Speed Through Shared Development
No single organization can match the innovation velocity of the global open source community. Maintainers and contributors collaborate across time zones and languages, driven by shared interest rather than corporate mandates. Engaging with open source effectively makes that worldwide developer pool part of your team.
Stripe Developer Advocate Chris Traganos described the appeal directly: “There is a huge open source community of code and developers to work with and draw inspiration from. To build better developer tools, we need a direct line to it.” Stripe keeps its proprietary IP in private systems, but many of its public projects are developed openly on GitHub, where external contributors can suggest changes and reuse the code.
Security Through Transparency
More contributors might seem to mean more risk, but broader code exposure also leads to faster bug discovery. Saebi has seen this play out at Comcast, where a dedicated team monitors security alerts to catch vulnerabilities before they affect projects or customers. “I really value the extra layer of protection,” she said. Tools such as maintainer security advisories and vulnerability alerts allow external contributors and internal teams to report potential issues privately, adding depth to enterprise security efforts.
Talent Magnet and Retention Tool
Both Comcast and Stripe report that an active open source presence helps them attract and keep engineers. Stripe recruits through the open source community; Comcast devotes engineers to projects such as Apache Traffic Control, Kuberhealthy, and Trickster. Zendesk encourages engineers to maintain a single GitHub profile that spans both internal and open source work, giving developers visible credit for all their contributions.
Public open source work signals that an organization values innovation and the communities that drive it. That reputation helps leaders recruit top talent and retain developers who want recognition and freedom to work on projects they care about.
Better Tools Through Active Participation
More than 99 percent of newly built applications include open source code. Many organizations already rely on open source tools without formally participating in the projects they depend on. The distinction matters: passive consumption offers limited influence, while active engagement gives organizations a voice in the roadmap of projects underpinning their infrastructure.
Stripe’s Sorbet project illustrates the payoff. Built to solve an internal challenge—adding static typing to Ruby—Sorbet now has global support from hundreds of contributors and organizations improving and building on it.
Cost-Effective Productivity Gains
Open source provides ready-made building blocks for modern software. Developers can search for and find pre-written code, usually for free, instead of reimplementing common functionality. This lets teams focus on proprietary, product-differentiating work, reducing time to market and overall costs. Before greenlighting new internal development, teams should ask whether the code genuinely needs to be built in-house—if not, an open source solution likely exists.
Open source has fundamentally changed software development. Enterprises now face a straightforward choice: lead in that ecosystem, or get left behind.
