Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

CBR is reporting that open source use in the workplace is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. Up 26% since last year, businesses are using 94 different open source tools to get the job done. "[OpenLogic's] breakdown of licenses for the top 25 packages found that Apache, not the GPL, is the most common license. 62% of the packages use Apache, 27% use some variant of GPL and 4% each use BSD, CPL, Eclipse, MPL and Perl licenses (since packages may be released under two or more licenses, percentages total to more than 100%).

Re:Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

[abigor]

From the article:

"Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006..."

Re:Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

[jonbryce]

I read somewhere that something like 90% of large companies use free and open source software somewhere in their business.

This probably isn't on their desktop machines of course. It is more likely to be things like web. dns and email servers, and network routers.

Re:Licence use

[abigor]

Apache license != Apache web server

Re:Licence use

[Cecil]

Surely not. Apache can do a lot more than merely serve PHP apps.

Obviously, it can serve any static files all on its own, and it can serve any other type of CGI as well (C, shell, Perl, Python, Ruby, the list goes on). Apache Tomcat is a enterprise-level Java server, and I suspect this is where a large amount of the corporate usage falls under. Apache can also be used as a WebDAV server, it can be used as a Subversion server too.

PHP is a hobbyist thing, not a corporate thing.

Re:Licence use

[snuf23]

Just because you use Apache HTTP server doesn't mean you are running PHP. Apache can be used to serve all kinds of dynamic content. For example:

Apache -> Tomcat (Java)
Apache -> Mongrel (ruby on rails)
Apache -> CGI (whatever)

I would guess that Apache/Tomcat/Jboss installs are more common than PHP in commercial enterprises.
As others have mentioned there are tons of projects using the Apache license. Spamassassin is a good example.

Re:Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

[Otter]

It also happens to be 25%, not 26%. But, yeah, that's an absurd statistic.

Re:Licence use

[LordLucless]

You've got to be joking. I see more jobs for PHP developers/maintainers than for any other web technologies (with the possible exception of .NET). I also know tonnes of businesses, universities, government departments, etc that run their sites using PHP. It is definitely a corporate thing. It might not be suitable for "enterprise level" (whatever that is) projects - it's easy to get REALLY messy PHP code when you start building something big/complex. But a big, important business does not necessarily necessitate a big, complicated website. And for simple CMS stuff, PHP is as good as anything else, and there's a large pool of developers to pull from.

Re:Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

[clang_jangle]

Not only is the summary is extremely misleading, it links to an equally misleading blog post with no direct link to TFA, which I found here [ebizq.net]

It's the number of free software packages up 26%

[clang_jangle]

According to TFA [ebizq.net] it's the number of free software packages that's "up 26%", not business use of free software.

Bad submitter, bad!!!.
Bad editors, bad! Bad!

Re:Licence use

[dgatwood]

"It's easy to get really messy [insert language here] code when you start building something big/complex."

There. Fixed that for ya. :-)

Re:We use Postgresql everywhere now

[uuxququex]

I don't have exact details (I'm a Pointy Haired Boss) but we have some sort of replication going on. A few developers are looking in to the code for that, as it is one of the areas that we might be able to improve upon. It's only just started so there are no results yet.

We did the migration in house, without any major issues. The data warehouse was a bit of a challenge as it contains around 3 terabyte of data, and Oracle took forever to dump. Loading it in Postgresql was a breeze though! ;-)

All our applications are developed in-house (financial transactions and analysis) in C++ for OLTP and Perl for the data warehouse.

Anecdote: the DWH as originally developed with Oracle Data WarehouseBuilder. After too many weird crashes (ORA-00600), my team did a quick & dirty prototype in Perl of the staging area. This was around 10 times faster than what we had. The whole system was then rebuild in Perl in around four months. Two months of testing later we went live. And, as I said, a couple of months ago we migrated to Postgresql.