Forrester analyst David Mooter published an interesting blog post in which he provided an overview of how the GraphQL ecosystem has evolved in recent years. GraphQL is a query language and runtime for APIs. It’s seen as an alternative, or sometimes a complement to, REST and other tools used for building and optimizing APIs.

GraphQL was created in 2012 by Facebook (now known as Meta) as an internal project. Facebook had found REST inadequate to support its increasingly complex mobile app infrastructure and decided to build its own framework. Facebook open sourced GraphQL in 2015, leading to its adoption by the likes of Netflix, Shopify, X, and the New York Times. In 2018, Facebook spun off GraphQL into its own foundation and transitioned its governance to the Linux Foundation.

As with Kubernetes, the growth and popularity of GraphQL created opportunities for startups seeking to address common pain points of organizations that adopt it. Apollo, though no longer strictly a COSS company, has emerged as a popular solution for managing the complexity of GraphQL that adds features like federation, connectors, and query planning. Wundergraph is a fully open source alternative to Apollo. Inigo, another Apollo alternative, recently open sourced its GraphQL Explorer product. Hasura offers an open source tool that integrates GraphQL with Postgres and helps organizations transition to GraphQL incrementally. Hive provides a fully open source schema registry, analytics, metrics, and gateway for GraphQL federation and other GraphQL APIs.

The example of GraphQL illustrates the COSS opportunities that a popular open source project can create and how an open source licensing model can be a differentiator between competing solutions.