Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

CBR is reporting that open source use in the workplace is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. Up 26% since last year, businesses are using 94 different open source tools to get the job done. "[OpenLogic's] breakdown of licenses for the top 25 packages found that Apache, not the GPL, is the most common license. 62% of the packages use Apache, 27% use some variant of GPL and 4% each use BSD, CPL, Eclipse, MPL and Perl licenses (since packages may be released under two or more licenses, percentages total to more than 100%).

Comments

Re:Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

[Poltras]

From the article:

"Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006..."

So they have more choice. They don't necessarily use them more often. It's like saying that you doubled the tools used because you took the screwdriver - but you simply used it once... Am I getting this right?

Recession?

[Average]

Perhaps the start of a recession (or recession talk) is leading to a second and third look at the question "could we get away with using FOSS software in this task?". Training costs are one thing. But, in a deep enough recession, people are looking to save their jobs. They'll learn whatever they are told to learn, and they'll do it on their own time (go read the FOSS community pages/wiki if need be). Those that can't, well, will be the first to be furloughed.

Re:Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

[roguetrick]

At my uni they make us pay for Vista, XP, Office, Server 2003, etc by adding it to our tuition... and still no one uses it. Fixed that for ya boss.