How Big US Firms Use Open Source Software 116
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."
You are looking in the wrong place. (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't often use open source products directly, instead we use tools supported by 3rd parties that are built on them...
For example:
Firewalls are based on BSD but since BSD licensing allows it they are closed systems forked form BSD a long time ago.
Our firewall management platform runs on Linux and contains many open source packages, you even have the option of running the management tool on your own linux but we don't, we purchased a rack-able appliance that is maintained as a whole. We get "releases" that update the whole app, server services and kernel as a working supported package..
Our ANTI spam package runs on linux and is based on spam assassin at the lowest level, however again, we purchase a racked supported appliance that gets frequent updates so we don't waste time trying to piece together all the little things.
Hell even our desk phones run linux under neath but do I care? no I wan a phone that just works, so I never touch the open source part..
If you are doing a survey on open source and you are looking at desktop apps and web-servers in an Enterprise, you are missing the open source software right under your nose.
Re:They are afraid of GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, not true. Big companies know how to develop with the GPL, and software engineers go through required training to ensure they understand what must be GPL, and what can be proprietary. The problem, I think, is that the scope of the search was "web facing" operations. I see an awful lot of GPL in large Fortune 100 companies in firmware development, and I've worked for 3 of them.
What doesn't happen a lot is that the GPL changes get incorporated into mainstream releases. Not so much because the companies hoard it (the opposite, they're petrified of lawsuits), but because the kinds of software development that occur in commercial enterprise does not necessarily produce good code that you'd want to incorporate in your OSS project.
Re:They are afraid of GPL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Critiques on their methodology (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience most specialist corporate software consists of Microsoft Office macros written in Visual Basic. Standard letters, reports, budgets, ... Companies just cannot switch over to LibreOffice and this is the reason. Office macros may not seem like much and aren't spectacular and might not even look particularly mission critical, but without them everyone effectively works an hour less and that you'll notice.
Re:They are afraid of GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
It is fear of GPL 3 and the anti patent troll provision.
Which matters if you are a patent troll.
Re:OS browser (Firefox) running on Windows XP (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yeah, that sounds like a good heuristic... wait, what?
There are some pretty big open source companies. IBM, RedHat, Google, etc. Conversely, there are plenty of little proprietary software companies that could die off and blow away by the end of the year.
On top of that, since when do proprietary software companies offer to indemnify their customers anyway? Do you see anything like that in the license for Office or Photoshop?
Re:adoption associated with.less productive employ (Score:4, Insightful)
False. First I was asking directly about the reports and why they are cited.
Second, open source has a huge advantage of making people more efficient. Lets take a frim I have been consulting with as an example:
First meeting of the day was about licensing. We had 10 people in a room to discuss what licenses are in use, which ones are going away, and what we need to plan to spend next year. Many other people spent the last week gathering information, creating charts, and writing reports for this meeting. Lost productivity: about 120 hours * 15 people. Next, we worked on trying to mitigate upgrades that two vendors are requiring, leaving them with an unusable system, 4 people assigned full time for the last year. Add in the fact that the closed source vendor has a bug in their software, and our million dollar support contract doesnt cover vendor bugs if they are to fixed in some upcoming version, the ticket is closed and we can suck it. They cant go anywhere else easily, they are locked in nice and tight, the data cant get out and they have convinced management that training is always more costly then change. Next we review how two other offices have reduced thier support labor from 20 people / 200 desks down to 2 per 500 desks using Linux thin clients and open source apps. The users are more productive as the apps are tailored to their workflow, not some clump of apps slapped onto Windows like their counterparts.
So closed source apps and proprietary data formats are the big labor wasters.