2025 was all about open source: a review and outlook

The increasing importance of open source is evident in numbers alone. GitHub alone, the leading platform for open source software development, now manages several hundred million repositories, a large proportion of which are public. Further significant growth can be expected, partly because open source plays an important role in trending topics such as AI. But what were the key drivers behind the growing appeal of open source in the past year?

Digital sovereignty must be mentioned here first. In view of geopolitical uncertainties, companies have placed a stronger focus on the sovereign operation of their business-critical IT landscapes. Consequently, open source has moved into the spotlight, because one thing is clear: open source cannot be switched off. Consequently, its use is also increasing. The Bitkom Open Source Monitor 2025 shows that around three quarters of German companies are already using open source.

The other major topic of the year was AI. Many companies are actively driving forward the introduction of AI, now increasingly beyond the proof-of-concept phase. If AI is also used in business-critical areas, as is the case with SAP environments, for example, the questions of independence and transparency also arise. On the one hand, security, stability and digital sovereignty with regard to technology, operation and data must always be guaranteed. On the other hand, there should be a high degree of traceability and explainability - and this speaks in favor of using trustworthy AI.

This is where the open source approach comes into play again, which stands for a high level of transparency and security. Open source AI projects such as InstructLab or the Granite family of open source licensed models, for example, are an ideal basis for trustworthy AI, which focuses on aspects such as explainability, transparency, traceability, robustness and monitorability of the AI models.

Open source technologies are also gaining in importance as they are essential for the design and operation of hybrid cloud environments, which are becoming increasingly important for various reasons. These include flexibility in the choice of cloud provider and suitable IT infrastructure environment or the high portability of applications. SAP users in particular also benefit from these advantages when migrating and modernizing their systems, which need to be integrated into a wide range of business applications and cloud infrastructures.

It is clear that the increasing use of hybrid clouds is also bringing about a change in application development and provision. No one disputes that containers and Kubernetes are the future of application infrastructure. However, virtualization technologies will continue to have their place in the future - for example, for hardware-related applications or for legacy applications that are difficult to containerize.

However, there are now solutions that reconcile both worlds. For example, companies can use new cloud-native application platforms that consistently support both virtual machines and containers in hybrid cloud environments in terms of management and operation.

Many developments relating to Linux and open source are not yet foreseeable. Only the desktop is still missing, but here too there are already signs of a small trend reversal - among private users as well as companies and public authorities. Although still on a small scale, Linux is expected to become increasingly widespread. Reasons for this include the end of support for Windows 10 and the general increase in awareness of data protection, digital sovereignty and secure operation. Finally, in view of current political developments, there is skepticism towards proprietary systems at various levels. The desktop is unlikely to be an exception here either. So it remains exciting.