State of Open: The UK in 2024 Phase Three: “Open Source and Market Shaping”
Market Shaping and Open Source explores how openness — primarily open source software, but also open data and open standards — shapes markets, and how market factors in turn shape open source adoption. With open source now underpinning 96% of software, the report examines how adoption breaks vendor lock-in and disrupts incumbents, why “if you build it they will come” is a myth, and what conscious interventions the UK needs to defend its number one position in Europe.
Report Includes:
Introduction and Conclusion
- Introduction, Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
- Conclusion, Dr Jennifer Barth, Research Director, OpenUK
Thought Leadership
- Market Shaping, Mike Bracken, Founding Partner, Public Digital (former UK Government Digital Service)
- Shaping Markets: Developing the Open Source Market through Public Procurement, Iain Mitchell KC
Fireside Chat
- OCPP, Open Standards and EV Charging, Lonneke Driessen, Open Charge Alliance
Case Studies
- UK AI Safety Institute’s Inspect Testing Platform
- OpenEHR and the NHS’s data fragmentation challenge
- The British Library
- Canonical’s Open Source Cloud for BT
Data and Analysis
- Shaping Markets through the Dynamics of Open Source: the UK digital economy and public sector spend, the global open source market, and the “open source submarine” under the digital economy
- Key metrics: adoption rates and trends, the finance sector, technical talent, community growth and organisational open source policies
- Market Factors Shaping Open Source Adoption: law and regulation, IP and standards, funding, procurement and skills
Executive Summary
This report explores the two-way relationship between openness and markets: open source disrupts and reshapes digital markets, while market factors determine whether open source succeeds.
Open source shapes markets
- 96% of software has open source dependencies and 77% of all software has open source origins — as sectors digitise, their infrastructure has shifted to open source
- Done well, adoption breaks vendor lock-in, enables interoperability and collaborative innovation, and offers well-managed code that can be recycled and reused
- Mike Bracken argues a “default to openness and interoperability is the basis of economic growth in the wider public sector”
Markets shape open source
- Corporate gatekeepers — finance, legal and procurement — blocked adoption for years; public repositories let engineers bypass them, but incumbents whose royalty streams are challenged fight back
- Lonneke Driessen’s account of OCPP shows an open standard in EV charging battling the establishment to shift a market for the better
- “If you build it they will come” is a myth: without good governance, community building and user engagement, code shared under an open source licence is simply dumped in a GitHub graveyard
Case studies in market shaping
- The UK AI Safety Institute’s open sourced Inspect platform offers the potential to shape the global AI testing environment, “enabling it to achieve a level of global collaboration that would otherwise be unattainable”
- BT and Canonical virtualise 5G network functions on OpenStack; the British Library and OpenEHR show openness driving innovation in heritage and health
The UK’s position under threat
- The UK remains number one in open source software in Europe and fifth globally — but Germany is growing at pace and could take the number one position by 2030 if UK growth does not increase
- France is already ahead of the UK in opening AI (Tortoise Global AI Index 2024)
- With a new government, the UK must grasp open source with both hands to secure its digital leadership — appropriate intervention requires legal, technical and community understanding
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