The most significant 2025 open source stories centered on three key themes:
Validation of commercial OSS (COSS)l,
Rising tension over license changes, especially regarding "source-available" licenseing
Expansion of open source AI and infrastructure projects backed by big vendors
Following is a breakdown of both commercial and technical issues.
Validation of COSS
Venture investment in COSS
The Linux Foundation/COSSA/Serena State of Commercial Open Source 2025 report found that commercial open source startups had raised about $26.4 billion cumulatively by 2024 and significantly outperformed closed source peers in valuation and exit value (roughly 7x higher IPO valuations and 14x higher M&A valuations). This trend clearly positions COSS as a mainstream, strong investment category for infrastructure software rather than a niche model, defying conventional wisdom.
The same report also showed COSS startups move from seed to Series A and B faster than proprietary peers and graduate between funding stages at nearly double the rate, underscoring investor conviction that open‑core/community‑driven companies scale more efficiently.
Moreover, the Linux Foundation report reiterated that OSS is now the backbone of critical systems across OS, cloud, web, database, DevOps, and AI stacks, yet “most” organizations still lack mature OSPOs, governance, and security processes around the software they rely on.
Licensing Trends
Analysts highlighted the post‑HashiCorp pattern: widely used projects moving from permissive licenses to “source‑available” or Business Source–style terms triggered forks like OpenTofu (Terraform) and OpenBao (Vault) that rapidly gained traction and vendor backing. These cases became canonical examples of how abrupt changes damage developer trust, fragment ecosystems, and push enterprises to reevaluate dependencies.
Ongoing debates over license changes (e.g., Redis). 2025 commentary emphasized that license changes for popular components like Redis—moving from BSD to SSPL and then AGPL—raised both legal and governance concerns, forcing users to reassess compliance, obligations, and the risk of retroactive term changes. This fed a broader narrative that organizations must actively track upstream license drift as an operational risk, not a theoretical legal issue.
Fear of future pressure on flagship projects. Thought pieces flagged that the business pressures that hit Terraform, Vault, and others could eventually reach projects like Hadoop, Kafka, Lucene, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Ansible, even though many are foundation‑governed today, keeping “license shock” on every architectural risk register.
Open Source AI
Open source AI seen as biggest beneficiary of openness. The 2025 global open source report noted that AI/ML was viewed as the technology area that gains most from being open, with adoption of open‑source AI/ML apps rising from about 35 percent to 40 percent in a year. Organizations increasingly cited code and model transparency as crucial for auditability, regulatory compliance, and keeping sensitive data on their own infrastructure.
• Major vendors expanding open AI portfolios. Nvidia’s acquisition of SchedMD, the company behind the Slurm workload manager, and launch of its Nemotron 3 family of open‑source AI models were among the standout vendor moves, signaling a strategy to own more of the open tooling and model stack for HPC and AI. Nvidia stated Slurm would remain vendor‑neutral and open source, attempting to reassure a very OSS‑sensitive HPC community.
• Growth of open “agentic AI” foundations and tools. 2025 saw increasing focus on open standards and projects for AI agents and orchestration, culminating in new Linux Foundation efforts such as broader work around open agent frameworks and protocols, positioned as a way to keep emerging AI infrastructure interoperable and not purely proprietary.
Enterprise adoption and security/compliance
• Near‑universal OSS use with security gaps. Surveys showed OSS deeply embedded across enterprise stacks, with strong perceived benefits like productivity, reduced lock‑in, lower TCO, and improved innovation and security; yet many organizations still rely on ad‑hoc “community health checks” rather than systematic security frameworks. This disconnect drove demand for SBOM tooling, supply‑chain scanning, and enterprise‑grade support around critical dependencies.
• Push for OSPOs and formal governance. The Linux Foundation urged enterprises to establish Open Source Program Offices and formal governance processes to manage license compliance, security evaluation, and contribution workflows, reflecting 2025’s shift from “we use open source everywhere” to “we must operationalize how we use and fund it.”
Tools and projects in the spotlight
• New and notable projects highlighted by industry press. Trade outlets’ 2025 lists of “coolest open‑source tools” focused heavily on software for AI agents, observability streams, cloud‑native infrastructure, and security automation, underlining where OSS innovation energy was concentrated. These lists blended long‑standing projects with newer entrants, but the common thread was enabling AI‑heavy, cloud‑native, and data‑intensive workloads.
• Linux and FOSS still central, but AI dominates the narrative. Community retrospectives on “Linux and open source in 2025” stressed that while traditional FOSS topics remained important, the biggest storylines were about how AI and licensing battles were reshaping perceptions of what “open” means, both technically and commercially.