Dive Brief:

• DevOps and open source technology can feed off one another and help spread best practices throughout a company, a difficult task in large enterprises, according to Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab, in an interview with CIO Dive. 
• Developers are often out ahead with faster iterations, but different tools and processes at the operations and security level can slow production cycles down, according to according to Sijbrandij. DevOps is becoming a greater part of enterprise tool kits, though organizational resistance and difficulties implementing have stymied effective adoption in many organizations.
• The challenge is extending DevOps from early-adopter teams to the rest of an organization, especially operations and security, and ensuring that technology supports all these groups. "What really helps is if the best practices are encoded in the tooling used, so that the tooling kind of makes it easy to do the right thing," Sijbrandij said. With open source technology and platforms, the community has the opportunity to create a solution together as well as monitor it and offer security and bug fixes.

Dive Insight:

Recent major acquisitions have demonstrated the rise to prominence of open source.

In October, Microsoft completed its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, bringing the biggest developer community with 96 million repositories under its umbrella. In the same month, IBM announced a $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, a leader in the open source space.

Alongside excitement and surprise, both deals have sparked some trepidation and worries in the developer community. With some of the biggest stewards of open source now under the umbrella of big tech, will the basic tenants of the movement be put at risk? What independent organizations might take up the mantle?

Five years ago, these acquisitions might have been more worrisome, but big companies today understand the importance of open source, Sijbrandij said.

The acquisition of Red Hat, the largest software company acquisition in history, brought no proprietary source code to IBM. Big Blue knows "they have to be a great steward, because they didn't buy it for the [intellectual property] because there is no IP," he said.

Microsoft and IBM have made commitments to maintain the culture of these open source stewards and allow them to remain unique units within the larger organization. For companies still independent such as GitLab, these announcements bring more attention and business to their offerings as developers shy of big tech control look for outside options, a boon for business.