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."

Comments

Critiques on their methodology

[j-pimp]

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.

They are afraid of GPL

[postmortem]

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.

Re:They are afraid of GPL

[Austerity Empowers]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They are afraid of GPL

[micheas]

It is fear of GPL 3 and the anti patent troll provision.

Which matters if you are a patent troll.

Re:They are afraid of GPL

[iserlohn]

I thought your comment was sarcasm, but then I read the first post off of your blog and realized that it wasn't.

Re:They are afraid of GPL

[Archtech]

Their original introduction of VB (with all it's short comings) made it much easier for people with limited experience to create applications. On the other hand Java based developer support was much weaker at the same time.

Yes indeed. I remember clearly that Java's support for developers was abysmal in 1991.

You are looking in the wrong place.

[BagOBones]

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.

adoption associated with.less productive employees

[cpu6502]

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."