Shaun O’Meara
Contributor
Shaun O’Meara, global field CTO at Mirantis, has worked with customers designing and building enterprise IT infrastructure for 20 years.
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The end of open source?
The use of open source software (OSS) has exploded, and many companies are using it as the cornerstone of their infrastructure. When buying commercial vendor-supported software, you can expect the vendor to be in charge of the products’ upgrades, maintenance, integration and support.
By going the OSS route, this is no longer the case. Instead, you will interact with components built by different entities, individuals, or communities with different standards and goals. For example, the recent Log4j security issue led multibillion-dollar companies to request support from the project maintainers as they had a contract with them.
Companies need to put many elements in place to use OSS in production smoothly. Here’s how to get started.
Auditing
Before committing to using an OSS project, you first need to complete a full audit: How many contributors does the project count? Are they individuals or organizations? Most OSS maintainers are volunteers, and their level of involvement is never guaranteed.
You are directly …
