For a long time, enterprise conversations around open source software have been framed the wrong way. Too often, they begin and end with cost. Sometimes with ideology. Occasionally with fear around support, security, or accountability.
In reality, none of these are the right starting points.
Enterprises do not succeed because they choose open source or proprietary software. They succeed because they make informed, contextual, and accountable technology decisions. Open source is part of the enterprise technology landscape, not outside it and certainly not above it.
This series is grounded in that belief.
Over the years, enterprises have approached open source adoption in very different ways. Some have adopted it deliberately and scaled it successfully. Others have struggled under the operational and ownership responsibilities they did not fully anticipate. Many dismiss it prematurely, assuming it is either immature or unsuitable for enterprise workloads. In most cases, outcomes depend far less on the software itself and far more on how the choice was evaluated and executed.
That gap is what this series aims to address.
Choice, Not Compulsion
Open source in the enterprise should never be about compulsion. It should not be driven by ideology, trends, or the promise of reduced licensing costs. It should be a conscious and well-governed choice, evaluated alongside supported commercial platforms and established enterprise products.
Each option has a legitimate role.
Open source offers transparency, flexibility, and long-term control.
Commercially supported platforms reduce operational risk and internal dependency.
Large enterprise vendors provide predictability, ecosystem maturity, and compliance comfort.
Mature enterprises do not treat these options as mutually exclusive. They treat them as choices to be exercised deliberately, based on context, scale, skills, and risk appetite.
The real power lies not in picking sides, but in knowing when to choose what.
Why This Series Exists
Each article in this series will focus on a specific enterprise product category. Observability, IT service management, identity and access management, collaboration platforms, ERP systems, and related domains.
The goal is not to declare winners.
Instead, the focus is on:
Where open source solutions fit naturally in enterprise environments
Where supported or commercial offerings may be the better choice
What operational and governance trade-offs enterprises must accept
How scale, compliance, and internal capability influence outcomes
These are practitioner-led reflections, grounded in real enterprise deployments, real constraints, and real accountability.
Setting the Foundation
This opening article serves as the foundation for everything that follows.
Before discussing tools, architectures, or platforms, it is important to align on mindset. Open source is not a shortcut. It is not a rejection of vendors. It is not a silver bullet.
It is a choice. And like every meaningful choice in enterprise technology, it comes with responsibility.
The articles that follow will build on this foundation, one product category at a time, exploring how the power of choice plays out in real-world enterprise decisions.
What Comes Next
In the next article, I will apply this idea of choice to a specific enterprise domain: observability.
Monitoring, logging, and tracing are often among the first areas where enterprises encounter open source tools, and also among the first where assumptions break down at scale. From community-driven projects to commercially supported platforms and large vendor ecosystems, the range of options is wide and the trade-offs are real.
The next piece will explore how enterprises should evaluate these choices pragmatically. Where open source observability stacks work well, where they demand deeper ownership, and where supported or commercial offerings may be the better decision.
Not to recommend a single tool, but to understand how the power of choice actually plays out in one of the most critical layers of modern enterprise systems.