Open source acts as an enabler for inclusiveness for businesses. Organizations use open source to serve small and medium businesses with low cost products and build a competitive advantage through cost and volume over dominant players who are focused at enterprise segments.
The strong community aspect of open source may allow organizations more agility around innovation and also allow addition of newer segments of the market around the products and services. In different words the strongest aspect of open source is that people or communities can innovate for themselves rather than waiting for a business to do it for them. Developers can also take advantage of specific database capabilities to release their product onto the market more quickly.
Yet, due to concerns about vendor or platform lock-in, many do not leverage these capabilities and end up writing a lot more code than they should, which lowers performance.
Open source allows significant innovation at different levels like technical, product and organization and has advantages of network effects for its users. The perception that it is singularly contributing towards just lowering the development costs of (new) products is not precise as because of the strong community the features, limitations and performance of the products are highlighted quickly.
With the greater penetration of open source in the market, enterprises are now forced to review missing market segments and low end consumers more often than earlier. Enterprises are aware that they may be disrupted very quickly by a combination of good enough product and big enough community and not necessarily the best product or a bigger/richer organization.
Finally, with the advent of cloud and ‘pay as you use’ infrastructure, there is democratization of infrastructure that complements open source technologies very well and allows startups to disrupt businesses.
