Open source has become less of a "thing" in the last few years. The AI community releases ambitious, often closed models and tools, and the nature of open source itself evolves. Yet open source is not fading; it's shifting to the layers that matter most: Kubernetes, observability, platform engineering, networking, and the infrastructure required to make AI work in production. Open source grew up and became dull, and we're all better for that.
Control through code
While headlines focus on the latest AI models, open source quietly chugs along in the background. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) now hosts more than 230 projects with over 300,000 contributors worldwide. Its 2025 survey found that 98% of organizations have adopted cloud-native techniques, and 82% of container users run Kubernetes in production. GitHub's 2025 Octoverse report shows 1.12 billion contributions, over 180 million developers, and a record 518.7 million merged pull requests. The Apache Software Foundation, though less flashy, reported 9,905 committers across 295 projects and issued 1,310 software releases in fiscal year 2025.
Who employs all these contributors? In 2025, Red Hat led CNCF contribution activity with 194,699 contributions. Microsoft followed with 107,645, Google with 91,158, and independent contributors placed fourth at 52,404. This pattern has remained consistent over the past decade, indicating long-term investment. Open source contributions are no longer mostly philanthropy; they are strategic moves by serious companies to shape the plumbing their products depend on. Vendors set defaults, normalize interfaces, and shape operational assumptions. Open source has become about control—not proprietary control, but control over the layers where ecosystems harden into standards.
Who gives, and why?
Red Hat's heavy involvement in CNCF isn't surprising. Its OpenShift is a Kubernetes-centric platform, so pouring effort into the Kubernetes world is product strategy, not charity. Kubernetes won because it became too important for any infrastructure company to ignore. Microsoft, once hostile to open source, now ranks second in CNCF contributions. Its investments in OpenTelemetry—a 39% rise in commits in 2025—reflect a land grab around observability standards. Microsoft, Splunk, and others help themselves by helping the project.
Cilium sits at the intersection of networking, observability, and security. After joining CNCF, contributing companies rose 90% and individual contributors jumped from 1,269 to 4,464. Google, Datadog, and Cloudflare expanded contributions as the project matured. Cilium is critical for distributed, latency-sensitive workloads, including AI. The real strategic work happens in projects like Cilium, where infrastructure determines whether AI workloads are governable, visible, and efficient.
Nvidia, despite its immense cash reserves, ranks 14th in Kubernetes contributions with 5,892 contributions. It open-sourced the KAI Scheduler and contributes to Kubeflow. This isn't just about selling chips; Nvidia invests in scheduling, orchestration, and workflow layers that determine how effectively GPUs get used in real-world AI systems. CNCF reports that 66% of organizations hosting generative AI models now use Kubernetes for inference workloads, calling Kubernetes the de facto operating system for AI. AI is making open infrastructure more important because few organizations want to build on opaque, inescapable infrastructure they can't inspect or influence.
An essential supporting actor
Open source is increasing in importance, but not in the warm, nostalgic way some imagine. It's becoming less romantic and more essential. The old story of open source as a fringe alternative or developer-led morality play was never true, and it's not credible now. Open source is where the cloud-native stack gets standardized, observability normalized, platform engineering productized, and AI infrastructure increasingly built. Companies like Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia pour billions into open source not from civic virtue, but because shaping the substrate gives leverage over everything built on top of it. As AI becomes pervasive, open source will only grow more central to the technology landscape.
Source: InfoWorld News