To gather insights on the current and future state of open-source software (OSS), we talked to 31 executives. This is nearly double the number we speak to for a research guide and believe this reiterates the popularity of, acceptance of, and demand for OSS.

We began by asking, "What does your company use open-source software to accomplish?" Here's what they told us:

Big Data

• Dremio provides open source big data analytics solutions.
• Testplant provides an AI-powered digital automation intelligence testing suite for applications.
• Open-source software is at the very core of Lucidworks' products and our business. We use it for everything from our search technology to machine learning and everything in between. Open source has been a major innovation accelerator across the entire technology sector and we expect that to continue.
• Talend uses Apache Open Source as a foundation for its big data integration tools. Apache projects such as Beam are at the core of Talend’s cloud and big data integration platform.
• data Artisans was founded by the original creators of Apache Flink, and the company is committed to ensuring that Flink remains the best open-source stream processing framework.
• Open source is a key strategy for OpenText Analytics; we leverage open-source software for key components within OpenText Magellan, our enterprise-grade AI and analytics platform. These include our big data processing layer (based on Apache Spark), our machine learning algorithm libraries, and our Magellan Notebook, which lets data scientists create and share custom machine learning models for analysis.
• Boundless provides an open geographic information systems (GIS) platform built upon best-of-breed open-source projects. This GIS platform enables users to visualize, question, analyze, and interpret data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends in their location data.
• DataTorrent is an open software company that enables real-time streaming analytics to help customers achieve business outcomes with low time to market. DataTorrent provides a fast big data stack using best of breed open source technologies that are hardened and integrated. DataTorrent is the creator of Apache Apex, a real-time streaming platform.

Database

• YugaByte both uses open-source software as well as produces open-source software, so we are on both sides of the spectrum. YugaByte is building a cloud-native database similar to Azure CosmosDB, and it is open source. We use open-source software to build our code, run tests, and deploy the software among other things. We also run load balancers to front end-user queries as well as to analyze data internally.
• ScyllaDB provides an Apache-Cassandra compatible NoSQL data store that handles one million transactions per second on a single server.
• Couchbase is a NoSQL engagement database.

Automation

• Chef has been at the nexus of modern open-source software development with the automation of IT infrastructure. In addition to being involved in open-source as a vendor for the last ten years, our founders and many employees have been open-source contributors or maintainers since the very early days of the Internet.

SaaS

• Platform9 is a SaaS-managed hybrid cloud enabling clients to deploy, manage, and maintain open-source software as a service.

Storage

• Scality provides open-source software-defined, web-scale storage to support digital business.

Platforms

• Qt provides a complete software development framework for connected devices.
• Camunda is a developer-oriented open-source platform for workflow and decision automation. We embed many different open-source libraries in our product, most of them licensed under Apache or MIT.
• Fastly uses open-source software in every nearly every portion of our edge cloud platform — from the frameworks that we use to develop our browser-based applications down to the lowest levels of the server operating systems and network.

Testing

• Sauce Labs is built around the idea of an open interface. We provide an automated testing service that allows customers to verify their web and mobile native applications work correctly across a wide range of browsers, phones, etc. using open-source testing protocols (i.e. Selenium and Appium).
• SmartBear uses open-source software to accelerate innovation and provide value to our users around software testing, monitoring, and developer tools.

Other

• We use Golang and AngularJS as our development languages, and we use Bolt DB as the internal DB engine inside Portainer.io containers.
• CA Veracode provides application security for the entire application lifecycle and landscape and 90-95% of applications are built with open-source code.
• Instaclustr’s business relies completely on open-source software. Our core business is operating open-source software (managed services) for customers who depend on it for their organizations — and, often, the application customers run on our services is their whole business.
• DH2i enables enterprise applications to move freely between bare-metal, virtual, and cloud environments with data-tier portability via an open source solution.
• TIBCO uses open-source software in various IT capacities in business and user-facing applications, but from a software development perspective, we leverage open-source software as a foundation for building our technologies.
• The open-source community is significant and active within IBM.
• EPAM is engineering the digital future. Writing code for full spectrum applications to solve business problems.
• npm runs the world’s largest registry of reusable open source software, and we maintain the software that developers use to install and combine those modules of code. Every day, about two-thirds of the world’s JavaScript developers use npm to combine open source code in new ways.
• Flexera uses open-source software in order to get best-of-breed software and components everywhere from our testing frameworks all the way to the components we build into our software and the operating systems we use. Open source makes up to 50% of the products we build and allows us to concentrate on functionality that makes our products different.
• DreamHost web hosting probably wouldn't exist if not for open source. Our whole infrastructure depends on Linux and GNU tools, Apache, Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL, WordPress, Let's Encrypt, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph to name only the most prominent names.

Here’s who shared their insights with us:

• Anthony Calamito, Chief Geospatial Officer, Boundless
• Jakob Freund, CEO, Camunda
• Pete Chestna, Director of Developer Engagement, CA Veracode
• Julian Dunn, Director of Product Marketing, Chef
• Matt Ingenthron, Senior Director of SDK Engineering, Couchbase
• Stephan Ewen, co-founder and CTO, data Artisans
• Amol Kekre, Co-founder and Field CTO, DataTorrent
• OJ Ngo, Co-founder and CTO, DH2i
• Stefano Maffulli, Director of Community, DreamHost
• Kelly Stirman, CMO and VP Strategy, Dremio
• Konstantin Boudnik, CTO Big Data and Open Source Fellow, EPAM
• Tyler McMullen, CTO, Fastly
• Jeff Luszsz, VP of Product Management, Flexera
• Angel Diaz, V.P. Developer Technology and Advocacy, IBM
• Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr
• Grant Ingersoll, CTO, Lucidworks
• CJ Silverio, CTO, npm
• Mark Gamble, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Analytics, OpenText
• Francis Dhina, CEO, OpenVPN
• Sirish Raghuram, CEO and Co-founder, Platform9
• Neil Cresswell, Co-Founder, Portainer.io
• Lars Knoll, CTO, Qt
• Brad Adelberg, Vice President of Engineering, Sauce Labs
• Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality
• Dor Laor, CEO, ScyllaDB
• Harsh Upreti, Product Marketing Manager, API Products, SmartBear
• Jean-Baptiste Onofre, Technical Fellow and Software Architect, Talend
• Antony Edwards, CTO, Testplant
• Matt Ellis, Architect, TIBCO Software
• Karthik Ranganathan, Co-founder and CTO, YugaByte