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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."
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.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
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.
It is fear of GPL 3 and the anti patent troll provision.
Which matters if you are a patent troll.
Work bio at MMWD