On Friday, October 5th, 2018, Elastic, which develops an enterprise search engine, went public on the New York Stock Exchange and on the first day of trading jumped 94% to a price reflecting a company value of nearly $ 5 billion. A few days earlier, Cloudera and Hortonworks, which also develop systems to manage big data in the organization, announced a merger for a company value of over $ 5 billion. These two events are part of a global trend of adopting free software that can be used free of charge. Recent acquisitions by companies such as GitLab and Jfrog indicate that we expect to see a continuation of this trend.
These events are exciting because these are open-source software vendors. In simple words, an open-source license allows you to use the product freely without charge. The user (or the organization) can customize and modify the software to its needs. For example, we all know Android, from Google, which is the most popular operating system for smartphones. Android is an open-source software system that can be downloaded and used free of charge. Smartphone vendors such as Samsung and LG provide customized versions of Android.