At the end of last year I posted an article commenting on how good the decade started in 2010 had been for open source. As it seems, things will only get better.
Red Hat charge a study on the use of open source software in the business environment. The result gives supporters of the open source world many reasons to be optimistic.
To guarantee the accuracy of the results, people who had influence in the decisions purchase within your organization: application development, application infrastructure, cloud, storage, middleware, server operating system or virtualization. Another requirement was that they were familiar with enterprise open source and had at least 1% Linux installed in their organizations. The research was carried out completely in 2019 and included the US, the United Kingdom, Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico) and English-speaking countries in the Asia / Pacific area (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore). I do not know why other European countries were not included.
All the 950 responses were distributed as follows
- 400 in the United States.
- 150 in the UK.
- 250 in Latin America.
- 150 in the Asia Pacific area.
Why a very optimistic future is expected
The first interesting thing that comes out of the data is the decline in the use of proprietary software in companies. Last year's survey showed that 55% of the software used by corporations was. This year's survey drops the percentage to 42% and a loss of 10 points is forecast in the next two years. With respect to open source, the analysis that Red Hat carried out by the writer on technology topics Gordon Haff, distinguishes two aspects. Open source developed by companies will go from 36% to 44%. The big surprise was the slow but steady increase in use of open source software developed by the community. Grew 3% in one year to the current 19%. It is expected to reach 21% in 2021
Another indicator that had an important jump was that of executives planning to increase the use of enterprise open source software. From 59% last year to 77% this year. 22% will maintain the current level and 1% plan to decrease it.
Perceived obstacles to open source implementation
Consulted on the reasons that could prevent the adoption of open source business solutions, Respondents listed the same top three barriers this year as last year: security, support and compatibility.
Haff thinks that these are ingrained prejudices, but without justification. For example, security concerns could refer to the belief that the availability of source code makes software more susceptible to attack, although this is rarely the way vulnerabilities are exploited. On the issue of support, it is possible to combine community-supported (and therefore volunteer-based) open source with enterprise open source, which by definition is rigorously supported enterprise software.
Another possible obstacle is the lack of internal skills for its implementation or use.
Perceived benefits of using enterprise open source software
The main reason given for using open source business programs is the quality (33% of the responses) The question of cost it was relegated to second place with 30%.
The other reasons were:
- Security 29%
- Be designed for the cloud 28%
- Being able to take advantage of other open source technologies 28%
- Access to the latest innovations 27%
The truth is that I don't believe in polls. And much less in surveys whose ultimate goal is dissemination. Even when the results are true, it is always possible to get the desired answers with careful selection of respondents and questions. If you searched hard enough, you might find proprietary software vendor surveys that say the exact opposite of the one I'm reviewing.
Anyway, It is true that open source technologies, particularly those with corporate support, are having a strong insertion among large users. And that's good as long as the benefits reach the customers of the companies that use them.
When it comes to the use of community solutions by companies, I can't stop thinking about Heartbleed.
This is a serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL encryption library. This library was used even by large technology companies, none of which collaborated with money or personnel in its development. An overworked volunteer developer made a mistake that could lead to a very serious security problem.
I hope that organizations using them will contribute at least part of what they would pay for a commercial solution to ensure its quality.
The very phrase with which you close the article is the reason why the future is not exactly optimistic for developers who are mostly precarious and do not perceive part of the benefits that the free software they develop generates for the companies that develop it. they use.
Expecting companies to contribute at least part of what they would pay for proprietary licensing competition instead of thinking that this growth should be reversed to rethink a fairer model that allows developers to live off the solutions they develop is perpetuating the precariousness in which many of them live and maximize the profits of these companies and with it the inequality in this world.
The whole world is going towards I do not believe you anymore, I have been deceived so many times that I lost all confidence and it is no longer that I am paranoid ... it is too obvious.
The whole world will go to a "do it yourself" as well as everything in life, what is made at home is better and is richer.
So guys for paid programmers, victims of all their own fraud and on demand ... the roll is going to end.
The human is like that, eye that does not see ... heart that does not feel ... or tell me someone if I am wrong.
The reputation of the closed source already filled the glass, we need the code to compile and audit
there is no other solution.
I do not comment
I affirm that all wisdom belongs to all humanity, as the only thinking mammalian animal. Greetings ex-.quadrupeds.