Palamida released in December 2008 the results of a year end poll, finding that 75 percent of organizations expect their IT budget to decrease either moderately or significantly in 2009, but that only 45 percent view open source as a likely solution to the upcoming budget gap. While this result may seem surprising in light of today’s economic pressures, the fact that 50 percent of respondents cite security as the number one concern around additional open source adoption could indicate the cause.
The Palamida web poll was conducted between November 13 and November 21, 2008 and included 177 respondents in senior IT, engineering, and security positions. Survey requests were evenly distributed across financial services, insurance, technology, consumer goods and services, biotech/pharmaceutical, manufacturing, healthcare, energy and government. Response was concentrated in the financial and insurance sectors.
The poll also found a very positive perception of open source software functionality and quality, with 62.7% of organizations believing that open source software is either equal or almost equal to their commercial counterparts. This countered the list of concerns, which in addition to security, included support costs and intellectual property risks as top three concerns around open source use.
Palamida's position is certainly that in challenging economic times, internal application development teams absolutely should be turning to open source to deliver higher quality software and Web applications with fewer. We have found that open source use is flourishing inside of organizations, with applications built in the last five years, typically composed of 50 percent or more open source content. Our experience is that open source communities are typically very responsive to finding and fixing reported security problems – and that, coupled with a proactive process for open source management via composition analysis, should reduce security concerns.
