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Open-source uptake on the rise, according to Forrester


By David Rubinstein
April 23, 2009 — 
From a list of 16 items asked of 2,000 software decision makers for 2009, the use of open-source software has risen to the top.

Those were the findings from Forrester Research’s April 7 report, “Open Source Software Goes Mainstream,” according to Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond.

These decision makers are looking for anything, especially in this economy, that can help them “go faster, cheaper, better,” Hammond said. “The mandate’s coming from higher up.”

Hammond said when software decision makers talk about their planning goals, items such as reducing cost, improving integration and staying innovative come up. “Only a few things,” including open source, “hit on all of these points,” he said.

“Open source is not as important as a planning goal, but it’s what can help [organizations] reach the goals that are important to them.”

Kim Weins, senior vice president of products and marketing at OpenLogic, which sells an open-source software provisioning platform, said adoption of open source has been happening, but that since the economic downturn, her company has seen a threefold increase in inquiries.

She related a story of a customer who needed to implement a piece of software, and after evaluating it and filling out the purchase order, was told by an executive to find an open-source alternative. Within a week, they had found the software, downloaded it, evaluated it and approved its use, saving the company US$1 million in the first year alone.

Beyond the economy, two factors seem to be driving open-source adoption, Hammond indicated. First, executives are seeing open source pop up widely; Facebook, Google and Yahoo all use open-source software, he said.

Second, companies are doing inventories of what developers have dragged in through the back door, and they are finding there is too much open source in their organization to stamp out. “Companies see they’re behind the curve and that open source can be strategic to them,” Hammond said.

Open source worth a lot
Meanwhile, a study done by Black Duck Software, which sells software that helps companies utilize open-source software, showed it would take $387 billion to recreate all the open-source code that exists now. That is based on an estimated 200,000 open-source projects and 4.9 billion lines of code, according to Peter Vescuso, Black Duck's executive vice president of marketing and business development.

“The open-source model, as done by Linux, Apache, JBoss and MySQL, has removed a lot of the fears and misperceptions regarding open source and has brought barriers [to its use] way down,” he said.

Among those barriers was the fear that using open-source code—with or without knowledge—could lead to lawsuits due to license violations or having to remove the offending code from business-critical apps, causing downtime and loss of business, Hammond acknowledged. Another was the fact that users wanted better support than having to throw questions out to a community and waiting on a response.

Hammond said that companies are not averse to paying for support for open source, but they are more supportive of the emerging business model of paying for a support contract separate from the license and upgrade cycle.

“With open source, if you’re not happy with the support, you don’t renew the support contract. It doesn’t affect your use of the software. It’s forcing companies to redefine the value [of what they’re offering] from bits and bytes to the entire experience,” he said.

Hammond offered the opinion that this shift in thinking could force ISVs to not just deliver software, but to also have to keep working on the experience around the core technology. He cited Genuitec, which has created the Pulse tool for the Eclipse development environment, as succeeding by extending and enhancing the experience around using the IDE. Genuitec creates common profile configurations that are updated and automatically downloaded, ensuring that every developer on a team or in a group is using the identical version of the software. Open source, he said, “is a healthy focusing agent for the industry.”

And health is something companies are struggling with in today’s economy. In its report, Black Duck also calculated that U.S. companies could save more than $22 billion a year through the reuse of open-source software in application development, Vescuso said. He explained that 10% of current spending on application development repeats what already exists in the open-source world, which translates into the figure the company derived.

By reusing open-source software, companies can free up funds for innovation, which Vescuso said financial experts say is something that can lift the economy out of recession. “Twenty-two billion [dollars] is quite a lot of fiscal stimulus power,” he said.

Anecdotally, Vescuso said Black Duck surveyed developers at the SD West conference in March, and it found that 76% of the respondents were using the same or more open-source code in their projects, while only 12% were using less.


Related Search Term(s): open source


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