Almost half (48%) of UK financial services and public sector organizations already use open source software, according to research by business intelligence firm Actuate. Only one in eight of the surveyed firms expressed no interest in adopting open source software.
Freedom from licensing costs was the biggest draw, cited by 64% of survey respondents. Other key perceived benefits were not being locked into Microsoft (45%), vendor independence (43.5%), and access to source code (43%).
Encouragingly, 45% of those surveyed said open source was either the preferred option or explicitly considered for projects. But that still left 48% of cases where open source wasn’t mentioned during the procurement process and 7% where there was a policy in place for not using open source.
Most companies had exposure to Linux (53%), followed closely by Apache. Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Mozilla, Jboss, and Eclipse also had strong recognition and usage among the respondents.
Long-term support and maintenance were identified as the main open source worries for all companies, while public-sector respondents were particularly concerned about a lack of in-house skills.
A 2005 Actuate survey identified 10 new open source projects launching in the BI and data warehousing space. Today, this number has tripled, with 30 major projects underway.
