Black Duck Survey: Open Source More Popular than Ever for Companies

Open source is now companies’ “default approach” to software, and open source’s presence within the business world and the use of open source has nearly doubled since 2010. That’s according to the latest “Annual Future of Open Source” report from Black Duck Software.

The report, which is the ninth such study, revealed several notable trends:

These numbers highlight just how pervasive open source has become even within companies that may have scoffed at it a decade ago.

The study also offered some insight as to why open source has gained such traction in the corporate world. Notable findings include:

Most notably, the Black Duck study suggests that the rapid adoption of open source by companies has outpaced their ability to manage it. Fewer than half of respondents said their company has a formal policy in place for managing open source software, while barely a quarter report policies on employee contributions to open source projects.

Most respondents also said they did not understand known security issues in open source software to their satisfaction — which presumably means that they are not sure how to respond when security vulnerabilities in an open source platform are disclosed. But that apparently does not detract significantly from faith in the overall security of open source code, which many survey respondents view as more secure than the proprietary alternative, as noted above.