The End for Open Source evangelism

Blogged 14 April 2021, Cape Town

Then, much FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt, was mongered by proprietary sources, hot air and misrepresentations, their products and business exposed by the Open Source delivery model that by nature guarantees quality, security and savings. When the train left, some jumped on for the hype, sans reciprocation, never really grasping the benefits of full participation. Many of these now amusing articles remain online, for LIMS see The 'dangers' of GPL licensing, Open Source is a sales trick

Red Hat survey The State of Enterprise Open Source 2021

1250 IT leader respondents

'Open source continues its march from being seen as a less expensive and a good enough alternative for proprietary software, to a place where it is seen as genuinely better'

Key benefits identified:

• Quality
• Low overhead 
• Security - 'Open Source is more secure', 87%
• Innovation

Good business ethics shone through too, 83% of respondents are more likely to select a vendor who contributes to the software. They are more skilled at providing services anyway

O'Reilly Media and IBM. Fall 2020

3400 Developers and managers

• Equal or better than proprietary software, 94%
• For cloud provision, 70%
• Skills preference, 64.6 %
• Better professional opportunities, 65%

'Organisations use Open Source because they understand they get a lot of value for zero cost compared to commercial solutions or developing in-house'

Tidelift managed Open Source survey. June 2020

600 Technologist respondents

While O'Reilly/IBM and Red Hat focused on bigger deployments, all organisations, large and small, turn to Open Source in demanding economic times, 68 % recently, saving time and money, and to innovate

Regardless of the cycle, in better times too, Open Source provides productivity benefits - 48% of respondents reported increased efficiency with development and maintenance. Avoiding costly vendor lock-in was a third prominent benefit (40%)

Security remains an issue on all platforms, Open Source though is regarded as more robust and quicker to patch. Open Source code is reviewed by many different contributors, enforcing rigorous quality control, and vulnerabilities are uncovered and removed early

De Facto

Open Source benefits are obvious today, but was not so clear in the 2000s when it was customary to pay license fees for programming languages, operating systems and databases

Today, Microsoft deploys more than 30000 developers contributing to their open projects, closely followed by Google et al. Most new coders have not worked in any other way, and 'No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged over the last 10 years in closed-source, proprietary form'