Every digital technology in the world undergoes significant changes as time passes. The modern age today brought forth great advancements and technological evolutions from a dominating artificial intelligence to the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT). Among all those technologies, open source still continues to retain its popularity and growth. 

Open source development services have evolved as well, now taking multiple forms that enable enterprises and individuals alike to leverage every other powerful technologies out there effectively. 

That said, let’s take a look at 5 of the most notable open source technology trends in 2018. 

OpenStack gains more acceptance

This free, open source cloud computing platform offers administrators to provision, manage, and control large computing, networking, and storage resources through a simple yet intuitive dashboard. It became popular mainly due to its transparency and flexibility which complements that of the cloud.

It’s now a budget-friendly alternative that effectively supports mission critical applications, and is increasing adopted for its contribution to enterprise application services. However, there are still underlying challenges when using OpenStack. Nevertheless, The OpenStack Foundation is working on filling the gaps, and making the platform better and more innovative than ever. It’s already gaining acceptance across the globe, particularly by startups look for good deals at a low investment. 

Rust will be getting more attention

Rust, an exceptional open source programming language, offers 100% control without compromising safety by co-opting compile time extensively. It’s also unique owing to the built-in unit testing capability, which recently got many developers interested in the language.

It’s now seen as a viable alternative to C and Python to write secure code, and is expected to be adopted more this year. 

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

ML makes a machine capable of learning and improving from experience without being specifically programmed to do so. According to Gartner, the scope of AI and ML will considerably expand this year. As of now, there are several open source technologies leveraging AI and ML capabilities for high-performance, cutting-edge apps and services. 

Growing community of GNU’s R

GNU’s R programming language gained a strong foothold in statistical computing and graphics, by offering a wide array of graphical as well as statistical techniques. It’s extensible to boot, and is one step ahead of the S language as it offers a more feasible open source approach to manipulate, calculate, and display graphical data. Its attention to detail is an added benefit, which is one other reason for the growing R community.

Conclusion

Open source is apparently still driving innovation after all these years, and is a major factor that contributes to digital disruption which is the norm in the present digital age. The technology has already proven to be pervasive, extending its reach to multiple verticals and industries across the globe and is one of the most preferred in the software development Dubai sector. We can expect so much more innovations this year, with open source in the limelight.