In the past, the development of software was something that required a lot of effort and resources. Basically, every piece of code was developed in-house, and code reuse was quite limited. The situation is now the opposite. Open-source packages are so widely used that they make up the bulk of the total amount of software produced by passionate hobbyists and virtually all the software professionals in tech companies. The convenience of reusing and fine-tuning components made open-source is just too strong for most software engineers to ignore it and keep “reinventing the wheel.”
To get a better idea of how big open source has become, we have some recent insights: according to a survey from Gartner, over 90% of the respondents stated that they rely on open source components. In another report from Synopsis, 98% of the audited codebases contained at least one open-source component, and 75% of the source code came from open-source. The report also noted that 85% of the audited codebases contained components “more than four years out of date.”