Open Source Adoption Rates

Prepared by: Martha C. Chemas, Esq.

New York, NY

What?A brief survey of diverse data collected and presented between 2007 and 2015 raises some questions and helps to identify trends in open source.

Who were the respondents & sources for the various surveys and studies?

Chief StatisticiansIT Leaders

Publically available web logs Manufacturing, education, financial services and

service companies and

included a cross section of small, medium and large organizations

Sources and data starting with most

recent:

April 2015“How and Why Companies are Using Open

Source”http://www.slideshare.net/blackducksoftware/2015

-future-of-open-source-survey-resultsStudy conducted by: a privately held software

company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts

February 2014 “Factors influencing open source software adoption in public sector

national and international statistical organisations” https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/documents/ece/ces/ge.50/2014/Topic_1_UNESCO.pdfPrepared by Brian Buffett, UNESCO Institute for Statistics Respondents: Chief Statisticians. 42% of respondents from Europe (p5). “a large majority of organisations who have considered open source

software have ended up adopting it and once adopted, usage expands from simple applications to mission-critical applications”

The most common factors affecting adoption which have been identified in the papers are: ii.Cost / total cost of ownership, viii.Concerns regarding intellectual property / licensing

April 2013

Seventh Annual Future of Open Source Surveyhttp://www.pcworld.com/article/2035651/open-source-is-taking-over-the-software-world-survey-says.htmlStudy conducted by: a privately held software company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts

“Lower costs, big data, and systems integration are the top three business problems open source is solving, the report found. Sectors leading open source adoption include government, media and healthcare.”

October 2012

Open Source Investment and Adoption Infographichttp://raconteur.net/infographics/growth-of-open-s

ource-gathers-momentum

At least 3 studies used for data, including one cited here previously, “Future of Open Source Survey.”

66% of respondents are familiar with the term “open source”

March 2011 Harvard Business Review, “Open Source Hits a strategic Tipping Point”

by Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

https://hbr.org/2011/03/open-source-software-hits-a-st Surveyed 547 IT leaders in 11 countries. Data reflect responses

received in 2010. “22 percent report they are adopting OSS consistently in all departments of

the company” “Most organizations, it revealed, have not established a policy framework to

guide decision-making on the use of open source software.” “A proper framework would outline types of licenses acceptable to the organization,

guidelines pertaining to intellectual property, regulations governing contributions to external projects, and an approved vendor/project list. Just a third of respondents claimed their organizations have anything like this kind of policy structure; the rest rely on ad hoc or informal processes.”

2009“OPEN SOURCE ADOPTION IN LARGE US COMPANIES” Spinellis, D. & Giannikas, V. (2009), Open Source Adoption in Large US Companies, in A. Poulymenakou; N. Pouloudi & K. Pramatari, ed.,'MCIS 2009: 4th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems', pp. 580─587, Athens, Greece http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Research/DIAL/Resources/Papers/

SG12_website.pdf “Hypothesis H2: The adoption of OSS is positively associated with a company’s

profitability” “67% of our data came from publically available web logs.” “The goal of our study was to provide principal research findings in the area of

open source adoption by large companies.” “In total the log files contained 278 million entries. Most web servers record a log

entry for every file a web client retrieves from it in a standardized format. The log entry contains the IP address of the client, the date and time of the access, the file retrieved, the operation’s result, page’s referrer, and details about the client’s software.”

November 2008“As Number of Business Processes Using Open-Source Software Increases, Companies Must Adopt and Enforce an OSS Policy”

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/801412

“Respondents were evenly distributed across manufacturing, education, financial services and service companies and included a cross section of small, medium and large organizations. The survey was targeted at end users and excluded software vendors and external service providers (ESPs).”

Observations: Initial perusal of data suggests:

Cost was often a factor in adoption, however there is disagreement about what constitutes cost.

Results of ongoing litigation (#googacle) may impact how cost is perceived going forward.

Risk & mitigating risk: lack of clear (or even existing) policy on OSS use was identified as an issue as far back as 2007. Lack of policy leads to lack of predictability and potential confusion, thus legal risk.

Attorneys were not consulted or did not provide responses to these types of surveys. Why?

Privacy regulations currently in contemplation & being enacted in some parts of the world may affect future collection of the types of data that were analyzed.

Copyright Notice:Prepared by:Martha C. Chemas, Esq.Co-Chairwoman, Open Source Software Committee of the American Bar AssociationMay 2016For educational purposes. Please feel free to copy, modify and distribute.

Suggestions for further reading:“March 2007 Open Source Software’s Expanding Role in the Enterprise Companies Adopt Open Source as Standard A Forrester Consulting Study Commissioned By Unisys Corporation” http://akson.sgh.waw.pl/~tszapiro/zwiad/agrd1/agrd1_pojemnik/OS_i_firmy_Forrester.pdf“Open Source Software Adoption: Motivations of Adopters and Amotivations of Non-adopters” Li, Tan Xu, Teohttps://faculty.ist.psu.edu/xu/papers/misdb.pdfWiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-source_software_by_public_institutions