While attending SD West in Santa Clara last week, Black Duck Software conducted a random survey of 50 developers attending the conference. We’ve all heard about developers using more open source today than ever before, but Black Duck wanted to get some feedback straight from developers themselves, so we put together some questions, circulated through the conference and started gathering responses. Before I get into the results, I first want to thank on the behalf of Black Duck all of the developers who took time out of their days to participate. Now, let’s get to the top level findings:
- Open source use is on the rise in most organizations: 44% reported using more OSS than one year ago, 32% the same amount of OSS, while only 12% reported using less open source that the year before
- Open source management lags far behind usage: Only 22% of those surveyed reported that their organizations have explicit management policies and procedures in place
- Only 40% of larger companies with more than 500 developers had explicit management policies
The fact that 44% surveyed reported using more OSS than a year ago confirms what many of us already know. The good news is that businesses of all sizes are seeing the value of reusing open source code in software development processes rather than reinventing the wheel and creating everything from scratch.
The cautionary note gathered from the results relates to OSS management policies. Developers are working more efficiently by using more open source, but those efficiencies could be severely compromised by the risks of not managing its use properly. No one wants unforeseen compliance, security and licensing issues to come to a head at any stage of the development process, especially just before launching a new application or service. Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research writes that fixing a problem in software is 30x more expensive after the product release than it would have been in earliest phase of software development.
Black Duck would like to hear your comments and feedback on the SD West survey. You can get more details from the press release. Take a look and please share your viewpoints.