Survey: Popularity of Open Source Grows in Mobile and Cloud Development

A recent survey has shed light on current trends in communications technology.

The survey conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners and its partner The 451 Group named “Future of Open Source Survey” has been released and shows interesting results.

The survey is in its fifth year and included more than 20 industry collaborators. It polled a wide variety of members of the open source community on the important issues, opportunities and expectations of the industry for 2011 and beyond.

As per the survey results, open source is in the mainstream, with both the public and private sectors embracing it across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data.

The survey team evaluated 450 respondents, including representatives from both the vendor and non-vendor communities. Respondents were asked about a wide range of issues impacting the open source software (OSS) landscape, including: economic impact on OSS, key drivers and barricades for OSS adoption, and suggestions for building and maintaining a profitable OSS business model.

Michael Skok, general partner, North Bridge Venture Partners said, “The results of this year’s survey clearly demonstrate that open source has gone mainstream not just within the vendor community, but within customer organizations of all types and sizes. Based on what we are seeing from our investments, it’s exciting to see new growth driven by the inherent benefits of open source like community-driven innovation and from fast growing markets such as cloud and mobile computing.” 

The survey also reveals that the user confidence in open source has increased dramatically, represented by the fact that users are much less concerned with historical impediments to adoption such as licensing or conforming to an organization’s internal policies.

According to the survey, that the open source customers are seriously looking in to mainstream technology issues, such as improved operational excellence around areas such as support, product management, feature functionality and return on investment.

This indicates that the future is bright for open source, even with the emerging technology segments such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)), private cloud, public cloud, and mobile are driving growth in open source.