Mediaboss Marketing

In its eighth and most expansive annual survey of open-source technology adoption in the enterprise development community yet, Forrester Research Inc. has found that the overwhelming majority of software engineers now incorporate free software into their workflows. That proliferation mirrors the growing corporate participation in the movement, which the firm says is already seeing over half of all enterprises either adapt or actively contribute code.

Both developers and organizations are adopting open-source software based on merit rather than ideology, according to the findings of the report. A full 80 percent of the more than 1,200 coders from tech firms and traditional companies that participated in the survey said they use free tools because theyre functionally superior to commercial alternatives in the same category, while 72 percent said the broad participation in open-source projects can make the codemore secure.

At the same time, the ability to access the underlying source code of open-source software, add features and fix bugs went up from the eighth spot on developers list of pluses to fourth while ease of deployment climbed to number three.

Corporate decision-makers have also grown more enthusiastic about community-led software in recent years and its not hard to see why. Forrester claims that open-source solutions can help shave 68 percent off operating costs in some areas while improving the efficiency of technology infrastructure nearly as much, freeing up time for more productive endeavors.

Cloud and virtualization is the segment where open-source software has gained the most fans, with 73 percent of respondents saying theyre using free solutions in that area, while content management follows close behind at 66 percent. And over on the mobile front, 61 percent of developers said theyre leveraging open-source solutions to tackle the fast-evolving requirements of smartphone and tablet users. In the future, Forrester expects drone development, gaming and enterprise resource management to join the list of segments benefiting the most from the movement, along with historically slow-moving sectors such as government, healthcare and education.

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Vast majority of software developers now use open source, Forrester reports