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

[Poltras]

From the article:

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

So they have more choice. They don't necessarily use them more often. It's like saying that you doubled the tools used because you took the screwdriver - but you simply used it once... Am I getting this right?

Recession?

[Average]

Perhaps the start of a recession (or recession talk) is leading to a second and third look at the question "could we get away with using FOSS software in this task?". Training costs are one thing. But, in a deep enough recession, people are looking to save their jobs. They'll learn whatever they are told to learn, and they'll do it on their own time (go read the FOSS community pages/wiki if need be). Those that can't, well, will be the first to be furloughed.

adoption

[rpillala]

I am in a "graduate" program where we frequently get projects that require photo manipulation, presentations, etc. They also require us to work in groups. Since not everyone is from my same company we don't always have access to the same software to collaborate. I've been using this as an excuse to introduce people to things like GIMP and OpenOffice. The appeal of a free program that gets the specific tasks done that we need is pretty compelling. I don't know how many of them pass this kind of information on, but I know a few of them have gotten hooked.

Re:..just wait till we hit a million percent!

[msuarezalvarez]

That has nothing to do with `statistics'. It is a simple fact of life that if you look at non-disjoint subsets, the sum of their sizes may very well be larger that the size of their union. This does not make knowing the sizes of the different subsets useless...

Vista

[MillionthMonkey]

This may be a stretch, but after Microsoft Vista, I think the business community could be losing confidence in Microsoft's future. They might fear that if they use MS products, they could lose support and there would be no one left to assume liability.

Bjarne is right

[Anonymous Coward]

I am with Bjarne on this one.
Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, claims that C++ is experiencing a revival and
that there is a backlash against newer programming languages such as Java and C#. "C++ is bigger than ever.
There are more than three million C++ programmers. Everywhere I look there has been an uprising
- more and more projects are using C++. A lot of teaching was going to Java, but more are teaching C++ again.
There has been a backlash.", said Stroustrup.

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

[jonbryce]

It probably isn't open source software if you can't get hold of the source because someone has taken some BSD code and closed it.

Re:Vista

[masdog]

I think it will take more than Vista to cause the business community to start to lose confidence in Microsoft. They have several other strong product lines that many businesses rely upon for their operations, and one bad desktop operating system isn't going to make a Sys Admin or DBA reconsider Windows Server, Exchange, or SQL Server.

If anything, Microsoft has shaken the confidence of the consumer market with Vista, the XBox 360 RRoD, HD-DVD, and the Windows Home Server corruption problems. In the grand scheme of things, that is small potatoes to the company that has locked up a good portion of the business world.

Make no mistake - Microsoft will not go away because of Vista, and no amount of wishful thinking can change that. It may hurt them, but they will continue to not go quietly into the night.

If something were to happen that would greatly harm Microsoft to the point that they would be going out of business (like this attempted hostile takeover of Yahoo), you can believe that they would be selling or spinning off their different divisions to remain around just a bit longer.

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

[roguetrick]

At my uni they make us pay for Vista, XP, Office, Server 2003, etc by adding it to our tuition... and still no one uses it.

Fixed that for ya boss.