The disruptive effect of open-source startups

The open-source software movement started in the late 1990s. Since then, open-source software has transformed the software industry. Today, many infrastructure software startups employ open-source strategies to market their software and win dominant market share.

Open-source is a disruptive distribution strategy. It allows potential users and buyers of a software to try it, evaluate it, and understand exactly how it works because the source code is freely available. Open-source companies market to developers exactly how developers would like to be marketed to — with code.