How Big US Firms Use Open Source Software

Diomidis Spinellis writes "We hear a lot about the adoption of open source software, but when I was asked to provide hard evidence there was little I could find. In a recent article we tried to fill this gap by examining the type of software the U.S. Fortune 1000 companies use in their web-facing operations. Our study shows that the adoption of OSS in large U.S. companies is significant and is increasing over time through a low-churn transition, advancing from applications to platforms, and influenced by network effects. The adoption is likelier in larger organizations and is associated with IT and knowledge-intensive work, operating efficiencies, and less productive employees. Yet, the results were not what I was expecting."

Critiques on their methodology

[j-pimp]

Part of their results are based on what they host their company websites on. I don't know about the top 1000. But when I worked at an ISP, several large clients that colo-ed several racks of equipment from us hosted their website on our hosted servers. If a company website doesn't do anything interactive besides send an email to someone in sales or marketing then thats probably what said company does.

Also, its really more interesting what the internal systems in a corporation are running, not the company website, which is usually not handled by IT.

High end traders, and F500

[xzvf]

Most trading companies have huge numbers of Linux servers feeding data to high end trader desktops. I suspect that many of the quants have both Linux systems for work, and Windows for bureaucracy.(email, expenses, etc.). Regular institutional traders use tons of open source software, but likely don't realize it. Sure, the desktop OS is likely Windows, the office suite is likely MS Office, but the browser is Chrome/Firefox. There is also all the stuff on the back end. If the database isn't open source, it is still more likely to be running on Linux than Windows (Db2 and Oracle), with the exception of MSSQL. Web servers, internal and external are more likely to be Nginex or Apache than IIS or other proprietary offerings. Commercial application servers have a small market share compared to open source ones. I can go on, but open source software is already heavily adopted by most large corporations. You won't see it on the desktop extensively, but it is there.

Re:They are afraid of GPL

[beelsebob]

Apple. They went as far as writing their own CIFS implementation and their own C, Obj-C, and C++ compiler front ends to avoid the GPL(v3) and its restrictions. They then later opened the compiler front end in a more open way, so clearly this was not through a fear of FOSS, but through a fear of the GPL.

Re:OS browser (Firefox) running on Windows XP

[omglolbah]

Getting any OSS software certified for use in the corporate environment is a mostly pointless activity where I work.

Corporate IT has in talks with the legal department banned ALL open source software from the network due to "unclear legality of corporate use of software". Since there is no vendor to guarantee that the software is legal and take the hit if it turns out to NOT be legal, they wont go for it.

No amount of lobbying will help us get access to what we want to use. There is almost -always- a commercial vendor which will sell a similar product and the people who make the decisions are so far away from the people using the software that they'll go with the vendor options.

Hell... The head of IT has actually come out and plainly said that usage of firefox on the corporate network was a huge breach of security and could 'endanger the entire company infrastructure'... This was a time when we were still using IE6 while the rest of the world was up at 8 and moving to 9...

If only it was possible to get some of the free options adopted more widely... and if only the corporate lawyer asshats would get educated on the legality.....

Re:They are afraid of GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked for Sun Microsystems and, more recently, Xerox on and with FOSS.

If you buy an A3 Xerox copier, it'll be running Linux (WindRiver) on PowerPC processors. Most of the software is written in C and C++. The colour GUI is written in Java and uses an X server. The informational videos (paper jams) are done using ogg theora. I can't remember which web server us used, but as much of the stack as possible is FOSS for licensing costs and for ease development.

I believe the source code is somewhere on xerox.com.