Open source software is pretty much everywhere now. The growth of the open source community has been unstoppable so far. Open source development services are of great demand today. 

What is it that makes open source so great? 

What constitutes this 'open source'? 

To get answers to all these questions, one should first understand the open source ecosystem. 

The open source ecosystem

In a nutshell, the open source ecosystem can be defined as a combination of 3 important elements.

• Community
• Innovation
• Everything else

Community

The open source community itself is one of the biggest advantages of leveraging open source technologies. Many companies in the Middle East offering Agile software development services rely on the community to avoid technical issues and aid with successful integrations. The community has a lot of users that can expose the open source software to a number of use cases that weren't previously thought of, thereby driving innovation. 

Startups can explore code developed by members of the community to figure out means to deploy their own products quickly. Essentially, the open source community helps build relationships via sharing and collaboration, and bridges the gap between developers and platforms bringing the former closer to the solutions they are seeking. 

Innovation

If anything, open source is a great means to foster innovation by allowing developers to expose their work out to the world and collaborate with other experts in the field who can contribute to making it better. The vast network of open source developers often fix each other's projects, identify unnoticed bugs, suggest improvements, and close security gaps. Being a part of the ecosystem itself drives creativity and innovation. This is many developers use open source tools to offer top-notch enterprise application services. 

Everything else

Despite high functionality, many open source codes may fade away fast without community support. The third important element of an open source ecosystem includes everything from people with expertise to reusable frameworks and libraries, an active sense of collaboration, and a firm belief in making OSS useful for everyone in an organization. 

The open source landscape is so big at this point that it's positively influencing a number of major industries across the globe, primarily software development. Anyone new to the community should contribute to keep the momentum going and improve their own skills with open source technologies.