Open Source Software: Sailing Into Friendlier Seas

By Jack M. Germain 08/26/14 8:09 PM PT

Open source software is now a force drawing enterprises and developers like a magnet.

The factors pulling adopters into the open source fold are changing, though. Also changing are the attitudes of software developers and corporate leaders about the viability and adaptability of open source.

Open source software is increasingly important within the corporation, as a recent survey conducted by Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners found.

Developers and corporate leaders now view open source software as a strategic advantage that can help companies create more secure products with better features and functionality. This helps adopters beat the competition.

More first-time developers are using open source, the research indicates. The open source movement over the next few years will gain new industries such as education, healthcare and government. Open source software is powering some of the hottest technologies in the enterprise today, among them cloud computing and the Internet of Things.

The growing trend of open source supplanting proprietary software is not the Black Duck-North Bridge annual survey's exclusive finding. Other research bears it out.

"It is very consistent with what I see in my own developer surveys and the surveys the Eclipse organization runs on a yearly basis," said Jeffrey S. Hammond, vice president and principal analyst for application development and delivery professionals at Forrester Research.

There's been a sea change in terms of IT department and enterprise support for considering open source software first, the Black Duck-North Bridge survey found, and it is having a significant impact on proprietary software.

For example, consider Microsoft's journey over the past 10 years, suggested Hammond. Microsoft changed from labeling open source software "a cancer" to starting up Codeplex.org and integrating its products with numerous OSS projects like Linux and Git.

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Open Source Software: Sailing Into Friendlier Seas