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Article: Open source thrives in downturn

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Edvard:
I wondered (briefly) how profit-making open-source-based companies would be doing in the recent economic downturn. I just got a little bit of an answer...
Collaboration initiatives are all about streamlining business processes, and the interfaces between legacy closed systems and open source stacks are an increasingly common place to find business collaboration environments.

According to research firm Gartner, open source software is present in 85% of enterprises and the remainder expect to deploy it in the next year.

While the large closed vendors struggle to steer their supertankers through increasingly unsettled waters, open source looks all the more attractive to budget constrained businesses looking to maximize their cost effectiveness.

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=172




picture from http://www.valeriovalerio.org/?m=200802

wasker:
According to research firm Gartner, open source software is present in 85% of enterprises and the remainder expect to deploy it in the next year.
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Unfortunately for FOSS advocates the number doesn't say anything. 85% of what kind of enterprises? What kind of software they've deployed? What portion of the enterprise is actually using this software?

Sensationalism at its best.

40hz:
Sensationalism at its best.
-wasker (December 24, 2008, 03:41 PM)
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Hardly.

All you need to do is look beyond the desktop. Open Source is more about enterprise applications than anything else.

Check the deployment statistics for Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and RHEL servers, Wireshark, Nagios, Wordpress and most other blog engines, various CMS  and CRM apps, Squid, etc.

Example: As of Dec-08, Apache is currently by 96 million websites (51% of all registered websites). Compare that to Microsoft's 63 million (32%). Add in nginx and lightppd at 3 million each, and the open source server total stands at approximately 54% of all websites. Google accounts for the rest with its proprietary webstack which is not marketed.

Sensationalism at best? I'd be more inclined to just say "sensational." ;)

wasker:
40hz, I'm talking about this particular survey which throws a number out of nowhere without any details and breakdowns.

Thanks for Netcraft stats, but it has nothing to do with this survey. (Although, it's funny that Microsoft's stacks is in comparable numbers with FOSS' -- check the numbers like 5 or 10 years ago).

40hz:
40hz, I'm talking about this particular survey which throws a number out of nowhere without any details and breakdowns.-wasker (December 24, 2008, 06:18 PM)
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The details are available. Unfortunately, the cited survey was conducted by Gartner Group, so it will cost you some serious money to read them.

Heise Online has a few more specifics about this survey. (my emphasis added)

Gartner: Open Source is pervasive

http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Gartner-Open-Source-is-pervasive--/news/111991

About 85 percent of all companies are already using open source; the other 15 percent will follow within the next twelve months. These are the findings of a survey carried out in early summer by market research firm Gartner, who polled 274 companies of various sizes from a variety of sectors in North America, Europe and the Pacific. The survey revealed that open source was particularly popular in the infrastructure sector, but that the number of free business-related applications was on the increase. On the whole, says Gartner, you are just as likely to find open source solutions in business-critical as in non-critical areas.

The three principle reasons for open source that Gartner found are lower software costs, lower development costs and easier start-up of new IT projects. Other reasons frequently mentioned are independence from a single software manufacturer and faster development processes. Customer service applications are the leading non-infrastructure workload for which open source software is used, followed by enterprise integration, finance and administration, and business analytics applications. The biggest problem with open source, according to Gartner, is the fact that nearly 70 percent of those surveyed have no explicit guidelines for the deployment of open source. The full Gartner report is available for $1295.
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I must admit, every time I see the price tag on some of these reports I can't help but think I'm in the wrong business!


Thanks for Netcraft stats, but it has nothing to do with this survey. -wasker (December 24, 2008, 06:18 PM)
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Out of curiosity, how would you know, unless you have a spare $1295 lying around? (see above) ;D

Still, I have to disagree. Web is at the heart of much of what is considered "enterprise." And Apache deployment is steadily growing.

But my primary intention in citing web server numbers was as an example of the current pervasiveness of open source. Web servers are one of the more reliable stats since the numbers can be easily checked. Most open source deployments are more difficult to verify since we can only go by the number of purchased support contracts which themselves only represent a fraction of the actual deployments.

Then there's that other problem that comes up. Not everybody who is using open source is an advocate for the cause. In fact, many companies who use FOSS applications oftentimes seem reluctant to admit they are doing so. Go figure.

(Actually, I could give several reasons why they don't, but that's a topic that deserves its own thread.)


(Although, it's funny that Microsoft's stacks is in comparable numbers with FOSS' -- check the numbers like 5 or 10 years ago).
-wasker (December 24, 2008, 06:18 PM)
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I'm not sure what you're saying here...but OK. ;D


Don't get me wrong. I'm not a cheerleader for open source. FOSS will ultimately stand or sink on its technical and economic merits - not its philosophy or good intentions. But I hardly think it's unreasonable to believe that just about every company will be using some open source app in the near future. I can't think of a single company or client that I'm dealing with that hasn't deployed at least one piece of FOSS/OSS software in the last two years. I find that interesting, since four years ago, only one of them had.

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