The Future of Open Source: Annual Survey Results Reveal Important Insights, Challenges

An event I look forward to each year is the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC).  It’s an event I’ve attended for many years, and is the event where the links between OSS and business are drawn and redrawn, trends spotted and explored, and OSS commercialization wisdom is shared.  Other conferences are important for many reasons; OSBC is where I go to reconnect with the commercial OSS ecosystem: customers, partners and colleagues.

This year’s event is especially meaningful to me because we at Black Duck decided it was time to participate at a new level. We signed on as a sponsor with North Bridge Venture Partners and The 451 Group on the “Future of Open Source” survey, which for people who run businesses related to OSS, is a fount of knowledge. Every year we await the results with anticipation – it’s been a guidepost for the current state and likely future directions of commercial OSS.  The number of “aha” insights varies year by year, but I know that each year’s results will impact how I think about our business at Black Duck, and how other OSS businesses will think about theirs. This year’s results are no exception, providing a blend of confirmation of past trends, and indicators of what to expect in OSS’s future.

The most encouraging observation for me was the degree to which OSS has achieved broad-scale Enterprise adoption – particularly when measured on the percentage of OSS in each respondent’s codebase. While many of us believed this to be an accelerating trend, this year’s results – garnered from more than 700 respondents, the largest cohort ever – are truly compelling.

Perhaps the most surprising observation is respondents’ view of OSS code quality. While there has been a never-ending debate regarding code quality, survey respondents were unequivocal: they view the quality of OSS as one of their top three reasons for adoption.

Another interesting fact: adoption by non-technical segments is seen as the most important trend for OSS going forward – a significant sign of broader adoption.

Then there’s maturity. Project maturity was cited by enterprises as the #1 factor in choosing among OSS projects, presumably because it is indicative of the security and robustness of the code, and the breadth of available expertise to help with self-support.  With over 600,000 OSS projects in the world today, there’s no question that some project communities are more vibrant than others, but we – and more importantly, the FOSS survey respondents – see new communities and ecosystems developing and flourishing. Community-driven industry innovation is showing itself in the emergence of “super-communities” like the GENIVI Alliance, OpenMAMA and others. These vertically focused, self-organized ecosystems are collaborating on entire open source industry platforms – the next-generation in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform in the GENIVI example.  These super-communities are starting to be the wedge pushing OSS into verticals such as automotive, financial services, healthcare, and others.

Then there’s innovation. As the survey results indicate, OSS is leading innovation, no longer following, in all the important areas: big data, cloud, mobile apps and enterprise mobility.

And its reaffirming to note the results prove OSS is a good investment and a smart business to be in. 2011 was a record year for OSS investment: it increased by 49%, to $675M. New software companies are increasingly based on OSS and smart, adaptive business models. Many of them are at OSBC, showing how their software solves real business problems, which bodes well for anyone who’s made an investment.

Of course we still, as an industry, face challenges.  But they’ve changed a lot over the past few years.  Most organizations now see OSS as important to even strategic to their development plans going forward.  The challenges that they face today in full-scale adoption relate to individual developers in their enterprises – their familiarity with OSS best practices, ability to find and choose the right components, get support and overall OSS-related technical skills are still top barriers to adoption. We need to help enterprises equip their developers with better OSS knowledge and technical more good technical skills.

This, in fact, is the underlying objective of Black Duck’s original acquisition of Ohloh.net, its imminent integration with Koders.com, and the major investments we’ve made to turn it into a destination for developers to learn about OSS, then search for and select the right components, once armed with better knowledge of what’s out their in the abundance world of OSS, and how to effectively navigate it.  The more OSS-knowledgeable developers there are in the world, the more enterprise adoption can be fully unleashed, and the more those enterprises will then need the solutions and services that the commercial OSS vendor community provides.

Of course there are unanswered questions too. The survey results pose some new questions:  How can we (the commercial OSS vendor community) help reduce complexity? Will using more SaaS solutions simplify the adoption challenges? And will customers and communities solve these challenges on their own? These and other points will no doubt fill the hallway conversations at OSBC this week.

I was honored to present these results first-hand at the OSBC keynote panel this morning. Accompanying me on the opening panel were open source industry leaders Tom Erickson, CEO, Acquia; Ryan Garner, VP, Direct-to-Consumer Services, Warner Music Group; and Gil Yehuda, Director of Open Source and Open Standards, Yahoo! Inc. Michael Skok, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners chaired the panel.

OSBC is always an exciting event for me, for Black Duck, and for the open source industry. I’m looking forward to a lively event. If you’re attending, please stop by to say hello.  If not, I welcome your comments and feedback to the survey here on “Open Source Delivers”.