Open source software is frequently chosen for its flexibility, ease of use, and low cost. However, according to Red Hat’s recent State of Enterprise Open Source survey, 82 percent of decision makers are more likely to choose an open source vendor.
The top reasons for preferring these suppliers are that they are experienced with open source methods and help maintain healthy communities (both indicated by 49 percent of respondents), that they can influence feature development (48 percent), and that they are more likely to be effective in the face of technical obstacles (46 percent).
During the pandemic, open source development has gotten a boost, and 95 percent of the more than 1,200 IT executives polled said it’s important to their enterprise infrastructure strategy and is steadily replacing proprietary software as a source of innovation.
Enterprise Open Source (EOS) now represents 29% of all workloads. In two years, that figure is expected to climb to 34%, while proprietary software will decline from 45 percent to 37 percent.
According to the report, 89 percent of IT executives believe EOS is as secure as or more secure than proprietary software. This is a four-point increase over last year’s poll. This contradicts the conventional wisdom that there is a higher risk because the code may be seen by anybody.
“The improved perceptions of enterprise open source security are something that we’ve been tracking in surveys, focus groups, and in customer conversations for a number of years though,” writes Gordon Haff, senior principal product marketing manager at Red Hat, on the company’s blog. “So the continued high opinion of enterprise open source security this year didn’t come as a surprise.”
According to the survey, 77% of respondents now have a more favourable opinion of enterprise open source than they did a year ago. Furthermore, 55 percent of respondents cite the ability to use well-tested code for in-house applications as the primary reason for choosing open source code.
