According to Hila Fish, the benefits of open source projects are supporting rapid innovation, the flexibility provided to customize and adapt tools, and transparency of the code which can enhance security efforts. The downsides are that security by obscurity doesn’t apply, open source is potentially prone to abuse, and when open source tools are not backed up by companies, it might result in a lower level of maintainability.
Hila Fish spoke about the DevOps perspective on open source at DEV: Challenge Accepted 2023.
Open source projects often have a faster pace of innovation due to their open nature, Fish said. DevOps teams can tap into this rapid innovation cycle to adopt new technologies and practices that improve their processes. Fish mentioned areas like continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), containerization, and infrastructure as code (IaC), where open source tools and solutions have driven innovation in the DevOps space.
