Worth seven times more on the stock market: open source pays off

Every year, the Open Source Summit EU is a good option for finding out about the status quo of open source software. From August 25 to 29, 2025, the Linux Foundation EU invites you to Amsterdam. The first day of the conference was of course packed with various announcements. For example, the DocumentDB project is coming under the wing of the Linux Foundation. This NoSQL database is compatible with MongoDB and has an MIT license. It even understands Postgre via an extension and can therefore also serve certain use cases from the SQL world. The project originally came from Microsoft, but has since attracted developers and participation from other companies – including AWS, Google, and Cockroach Labs. The transition to the Linux Foundation makes this vendor neutrality even clearer.

AI agents quick and easy

The first AI sign comes from Solo.io, as their Agent Gateway project is now also under the care of the Linux Foundation. The software is a so-called data plane for AI agents and their platform. Among other things, it supports the well-known MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent2Agent) protocols. In addition to Solo.io, developers from AWS, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat are also involved. Once again, the switch to the Linux Foundation is intended to emphasize vendor neutrality. Speaking of agents, these may have to be developed first. The Strands Agents project aims to reduce this initial hurdle. The promise is to build AI agents with just a few lines of code. Strands Agent is a construction kit and development environment written for Python. This can be installed with pip install strands-agents strands-agents-tools. According to the documentation, four lines of Python code are then sufficient to build a very simple agent.

How open source pays off

But back to the topic of open source in general and also through a European lens. According to a report by the Linux Foundation, 90 percent of European companies surveyed believe that open source software offers stable or even growing value. The arguments for this are better software quality, increased competitiveness through collaboration in open source projects and higher productivity. The most widespread category is operating systems (64%), followed by container technology (55%) and web and application development (54%). As open source is the basis of the modern internet, open source software is now a fundamental and critical component of today's IT infrastructure. The associated projects require developers and managers, but also financial resources.

One example of this is the dilemma surrounding NTP and its solution with the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII). However, this approach does not scale. The natural way forward is for manufacturers who use open source in their own products to also invest in the respective projects. This idea has now gained momentum. Companies employ developers who are involved in strategically important open source projects. Or they pay into funds of the Linux Foundation or other bodies. There is now also the term COSS (Commercial Open Source Software). Roughly speaking, this is a product or service that is fundamentally based on one or more software projects.

The Linux Foundation has now published a report on COSS companies. When they go public, they are on average seven times more valuable than their non-open source counterparts. If they are part of an acquisition, the factor is as high as 14. COSS companies are predominantly (90 percent) active in the infrastructure sector. Of the COSS companies represented on the stock exchange, 65 percent are from the USA. The EU is in second place with 25 percent. Open source is therefore omnipresent in the IT world and has a recognized value – also expressed in hard cash.

(mack)