Simula’s survey found that 33.1% of respondents chose greater control over software code as their top reason to use open source, compared to roughly a quarter of respondents who said cost was the main benefit.

Another 19.5% said lower barriers to evaluating tools was the key reason, and another 18.3% said avoiding vendor lock-in was the important point.

In Simula’s interpretation of the results, An overwhelming majority (74.7%) of survey respondents said that cost was not primary reason for adopting and deploying open source software within their organization.

According to Natalie Burdick, vice president of product management for Simula Labs, the survey validated the idea that open source companies like Simular can compete with free, and that customers of open source tools are looking for more than just freebies.

Simula Labs is a group of open source tools providers founded by Winston Damarillo, who previously founded and sold Gluecode to IBM.

The survey was intended as a reality check for Simula, which oversees a couple of open source products covering enterprise service bus and software lifecycle management for Java projects.

The survey polled roughly 1,150 software developers who use Simula’s Logic Blaze ESB or Mergere ALM products. Of the majority who cited reasons other than cost for using open source tooling, the overriding theme was freedom of action.

The other portions of the survey were aimed at reality checking the product development roadmaps of the Simula Labs companies, LogicBlaze and Mergere.

For LogicBlaze, it was the finding that over half of its customers are at some stag of SOA development., Admittedly, that finding shouldn’t be surprising, given that the company offers an ESB, and therefore, the sample was a bit self selecting.

But for Mergere, whose recently-launched Maestro packages open source distributions of several Apache Foundation software build and project management tools, the results verified the fact that its software build tools are based on a technology base that has yet to capture most of the market.

Its tools are built on Apache Maven, a build utility that provides a more object-oriented approach to assembling cross-platform software builds. But the older Apache Ant, which provides a lower level scripting approach to software builds, remains the dominant tool.

The survey told the company that it needs to still accommodate Ant users through the ability to convert Ant build files to Maven objects, backed by capabilities to fully migrate them.

We weren’t surprised by the findings, said Burdick, It helped us focus on a couple key areas that we were already thinking about.