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."
They are afraid of GPL (Score:5, Interesting)
Most companies are afraid to derive products from projects with GPL license, in fear that they will have to share all their code (even unrelated) with customers, and that exact obligation from license is unclear, and might change in court.
Now, article seems to be more about using SW tools developed with GPL license; not developing their own products from GPL components. That is lesser issue.
adoption associated with.less productive employees (Score:5, Interesting)
This part surprised me, til I read this:
"Open source software is often less polished than its proprietary alternatives; version proliferation and poor usability are two often-reported problems [Nichols and Twidale, 2003,Krishnamurthy, 2005,Viorres et al., 2007]. Highly-paid employees, like knowledge workers, may argue that the fit of the OSS [Thompson et al., 1991], the service quality it offers [DeLone and McLean, 2003], or the perceived behavioral control they have over it [Ajzen, 1991] is worse than that of its proprietary alternative. The key factors for resisting such change can be classified into people-oriented, system-oriented, and interaction theories [Jiang et al., 2000]. As the cost of the software used by highly productive workers forms a small percentage of their total employment cost and the software's quality reflects a lot on their productivity, spending on industry-standard proprietary software may be a rational decision. Consequently, we could expect that the relative advantage of OSS viewed as an innovation [Moore and Benbasat, 1991,Rogers, 2003] will be marginal. As an example, traders with seven figure incomes are unlikely to skimp on the operating system running on their PCs.
--> "Conversely, in Fortune 1000 companies with numerous but less productive employees adoption of cheaper though less polished OSS can offer significant cost advantages, and therefore management can easier mandate its use. For instance, we can easily imagine the cost savings associated with thousands of service desks running Linux and the Thunderbird mail client."
Re:we're using a lot of open source tools (Score:4, Interesting)
-we use apache/resin to serve our Java clients -Apache and resin do run on windows you know.
-however, our big workload on the backend is the realtime financial markets data that we have to turn around with minimal latency to the tune of up to 10 million messages/second, 22 billion messages per DAY. We are doing this on 8-core Win2003 boxes, but could probably last another year or 2 on the same hw by switching to Linux and have Linux pilots running on both medium iron (IBM Linux variant) and the midrange servers (OpenSUSE).
And the message volumes are going up ~20% per year....
-I'm just sayin'
Re:They are afraid of GPL (Score:3, Interesting)
Posting AC. Take the anecdotes for what they are.
Small Biz: Oil & Gas enterprise services < 25 employees. Would not use any open license but BSD or MIT. GPL3 was extra terrifying because we sold tivoized hardware. Moved on.
"Small" Academic Environment: 250-500 employees. Expressly forbidden to use Linux because it was "insecure". Moved on.
Ultra Small office of Local Government: "Just download what you need off of that torrent stuff". Did not understand software had a license, so maybe this is irrelevant. Moved on.
Very Large Academic: > 5000 employees. There's actually an outright hatred of open software for anything but the "core" services... e.g. email or throwing up a website. Middle management continually attempts to kill non-microsoft development to the point where I'm contemplating resigning to better use my skills elsewhere. I seriously believe there are kickbacks involved, but couldn't prove it.
Doing freelance, myself and old college bro ~1/4 of the time specifically encountered MS specific requests, but usually when presented with the price difference people change their mind.