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How Big US Firms Use Open Source Software

Posted by timothy on from the filling-the-gaps-in-the-walls dept.

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."

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Critiques on their methodology by j-pimp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    --- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
  2. Re:They are afraid of GPL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.