Future of Open Source Survey Shows Organizations Everywhere Running FOSS

Black Duck Software has been doing influential surveys on open source software for years, and the most widely followed one is its Future of Open Source Survey. The latest Annual Future of Open Source report from Black Duck Software is in, and it is the ninth iteration of the survey.

Probably the biggest finding is that 78 percent of respondents report running their operations in part or in whole on open source software. That's nearly double the 42 percent who responded the same way in 2010. And you thought open source hadn't fully arrived yet?

The  results from the 2015 Future of Open Source Survey reflect the  increasing adoption of open source and highlight the abundance of  organizations participating in the open source community. Open source  continues to speed innovation, disrupt industries, and improve  productivity; however, a reported lack of formal company policies and  processes around its consumption points to a need for OSS management and  security practices to catch up with this growth in investment and use.

Here are some of the specific findings:

 Seventy-eight percent of respondents said their companies run part or all of its operations on OSS and 66 percent said their company creates software for customers built on open source. This is almost double the number of respondents – forty-two percent - which said in 2010 that they used open source in the running of their business or their IT environments.
   

Ninety-three percent said their organization’s use of open source increased or remained the same in the past year.
   

Sixty-four percent of companies currently participate in open source projects – up from 50 percent in 2014– and over the next 2-3 years, 88 percent are expected to increase contributions to open source projects.
   

Open source has become the default approach for software with more than 66 percent of respondents saying they consider OSS before other options.

    Fifty-eight percent believe open source affords the greatest ability to scale and 43 percent said OSS provides superior ease of deployment over proprietary software.
   

Fifty-five percent believe open source delivers superior security when lined up against proprietary solutions. The superior security of open source is also expected to rise to 61 percent over the next 2-3 years.
   

When evaluating security technologies for internal use, 45 percent of respondents said open source options are given first consideration.

Cloud computing (39%), big data (35%), operating systems (33%), and the Internet of Things (31%) are expected to be impacted most by open source in the next 2-3 years.