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

[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

[iserlohn]

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

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.