Open Source: The Backbone of Our Digital Lives

I still hear, although much less frequently than before, technology leaders across Latin America talk about “not trusting open source.” I understand where that hesitation comes from, historically. But I’ve started responding to that with a simple challenge: ask that person to stop using everything in their daily life that depends on open source, and see what’s left.

Try it yourselves. Did you use WhatsApp today? It was built primarily on Erlang, an open-source programming language and platform. Did you watch something on Netflix last night? Netflix maintains hundreds of open-source projects that are widely used across the streaming, cloud computing, and platform engineering industries. Did you buy something on Amazon? A significant portion of the infrastructure and services powering AWS relies on open-source technologies, in addition to dozens of open-source projects maintained by Amazon itself. Microsoft is one of the largest corporate contributors to Linux and the broader open-source ecosystem. Spotify developed and open-sourced Backstage, now one of the most widely adopted Internal Developer Portal (IDP) platforms on the market. Uber has also open-sourced dozens of projects that are widely used by the infrastructure and data engineering communities.

These seven companies alone have a combined market capitalization of nearly US$9 trillion, more than the entire economy of Latin America. If market capitalization feels too abstract, compare revenue instead: together, these companies generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue, on a scale comparable to the largest economies in Latin America. Now compare their user bases: Spotify alone has around 700 million users worldwide, more than the entire population of Latin America. WhatsApp has approximately 3 billion users. None of this scale would be possible without open source behind it.

So, I believe it’s time we stop treating “Does open source work?” as an open question. That debate belongs to decades past and has long since been settled. We now operate in a completely different business landscape, in which it is hard to have any conversation about enterprise software without open source being part of the discussion.

From Standalone Metrics to True Observability

This is particularly important when it comes to a challenge that many IT leaders face today: fragmentation. It’s common to find organizations using three, four, or sometimes many more separate platforms to monitor infrastructure, application performance, logs, and network data. In fact, I’ve come across reports of companies using as many as fourteen different tools. Each one comes with its own license, its own database, its own source of truth and, paradoxically, only half the visibility you would expect from so many tools. More platforms rarely mean greater clarity. Instead, they often create more blind spots hidden in the gaps between them.

This is the backdrop to the most significant transformation currently taking place in the monitoring industry: the shift from standalone metrics to true observability, with the ability to correlate metrics, logs, traces, and application performance data into a single, coherent view of what’s happening across increasingly hybrid and distributed environments. It's essential to understand why, and to do so in time to take action.

This shift in scope is relevant to any organization that depends on mission-critical technology, which today is virtually every organization. Monitoring is no longer enough; log management, event correlation, and anticipating failures before they impact the business have become the new standard.

The Convergence of IT and OT

There is a regional dimension to this that I believe is often underestimated. Latin America has a large base of heavy industries, such as energy, mining, and manufacturing, where information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) environments have historically existed in separate worlds, monitored by tools that rarely communicate with one another. Extending observability across this convergence, from the data center to industrial machinery, is one of the most significant opportunities facing technology leaders in our region today. In my view, organizations that succeed in viewing IT and OT through the same lens will gain a real advantage in preventing failures, reducing operational costs, and responding more quickly to incidents that currently go unnoticed between departments.

What This Means in Practice

The broader point I always come back to is that open source stopped being an alternative path a long time ago. It is now the foundation on which the digital economy we rely on every day is built. The question worth asking is whether your organization treats observability as a strategic capability or still sees it as a secondary operational function. For technology leaders in Latin America today, the challenge is deciding how quickly their organizations will consolidate visibility across increasingly complex environments.