This year Black Duck and North Bridge released the tenth annual Future of Open Source Survey to investigate open source software development trends. The highlight of this year’s survey is the current mainstream society’s acceptance of open source software and the changes in people’s attitudes toward open source software over the past decade.
The 2016 Future of Open Source Survey analyzed feedback from approximately 3,400 experts. In this year’s survey, developers expressed their views, with approximately 70% of participants being developers. Data shows that the number of security experts participating has grown exponentially, increasing by more than 450%. Their participation indicates that the open source community is gradually beginning to pay attention to security issues in open source software and ensuring security when new technologies emerge.
Black Duck’s Annual Open Source Rookies Award involves some emerging technologies, such as Docker and Kontena in containers. Container technology has seen tremendous development this year—76% of respondents said their enterprises have plans to use container technology. Meanwhile, 59% of respondents are preparing to use container technology for large-scale deployments, from development and testing to internal and external production environment deployments. The developer community has embraced container technology as a simple and fast development method.
The survey shows that almost every organization has developers working on open source software, which is not surprising. When big companies like Microsoft and Apple open source some of their solutions, developers get more opportunities to participate in open source projects. I very much hope this trend will continue, allowing more software developers to work on open source projects both during work and outside of work.
Key Points from the 2016 Survey Results
Business Value
- Open source software is an important element in development strategy, with over 65% of respondents using open source software to accelerate software development progress.
- Over 55% of respondents use open source software in production environments.
Driving Force for Innovation
- Respondents indicated that the use of open source software makes software development faster and more flexible, thereby promoting innovation; at the same time, it accelerates time-to-market for software and greatly reduces time spent communicating with superiors.
- Open source software’s high-quality solutions, competitive features, technical capabilities, and customization capabilities have also promoted more innovation.
Surge in Open Source Business Models and Investment
- The emergence of more different business models has brought unprecedented value to open source enterprises. This value does not depend on cloud services and technical support.
- Open source private financing has grown nearly fourfold in the past five years.
Security and Governance
The development of first-class open source security and governance practices has not kept pace with the growing use of open source. Despite the explosive growth of high-profile open source projects in recent years, survey results point out:
- 50% of enterprises have no formal policies for selecting and approving open source code.
- 47% of enterprises have no formal processes to track open source code, which limits their understanding and control of open source code.
- More than one-third of enterprises have no processes for identifying, tracking, and fixing major open source security vulnerabilities.
Growing Open Source Participants
Survey results show that an active enterprise open source community inspires innovation, provides value, and shares fellowship:
- 67% of respondents said they actively encourage developers to participate in open source projects.
- 65% of enterprises are committed to open source projects.
- About one-third of enterprises have full-time positions specifically for open source projects.
- 59% of respondents participate in open source projects to gain competitive advantage.
Black Duck and North Bridge learned a lot from this year’s survey, such as security, policies, business models, etc. We are excited to share these new findings. Thanks to our collaborators and all respondents who participated in our survey. It’s been a great decade, and I’m glad we can confidently say that the future of open source is full of infinite possibilities.
To learn more, you can view the complete survey results.
Reposted from: Developer Relations »
