A recently released survey shows some interesting changes in attitudes towards open source. Zenoss, the open-source server and network monitoring vendor, just released its annual 2010 Open Source Management Survey, a regular report on open source adoption. At a high level, the report indicates that open source is viewed as easier to deploy than it was previously, and that IT professionals are showing a preference for open source. IT is focusing on the service and documentation aspects of software, rather than its open or proprietary nature.
Some of this year’s findings include:
- 71 percent of 2009 respondents indicated that open-source software was easier to deploy, up from 48 percent in 2008, 38 percent in 2007, and 26 percent in 2006.
- 76 percent of system administrators in large enterprises indicate they prefer to use open-source software whenever possible.
- The No. 1 reason for not choosing open-source solutions was lack of support followed by poor documentation.
- Quality of support was the No. 1 reason organizations indicated they chose proprietary management tools.
- 50 percent of respondents indicated that they are already using some form of cloud technology, including, but not limited to, hosted applications, Amazon Web Services, and/or hosted storage
- The top IT management priorities for 2010 were monitoring, configuration management, patching and provisioning, and security.
It’s refreshing to see IT pros focus on the real issues here — support, documentation and he like — rather than responding to the often baseless fears around open source that many proprietary vendors seem to perpetuate.
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