Corporate IT users are more confident of open source
software than they were in 2002, according to the 2003 open source
perception survey from IT Forum Foundation.The survey comprised 62 chief information
officers and heads of IT from large financial services, retail and
public sector organisations. Some 46% of respondents said they had
greater confidence in open source than last year. The main use of
open source was for IT infrastructure - 62% of respondents said
they were using open source to run web servers and firewalls within
their organisations.
"Few organisations have changed their overall
perception of open source, but there is a big push in terms of
confidence, " said Graham Taylor, a director at IT Forum
Foundation.
While the 2002 survey showed users were
looking at open source software to reduce their IT costs, the 2003
research found that security was a high priority among respondents,
Taylor said.
"A year ago people felt open source would be a
hacker's charter since everyone had access to the code," he said,
"but access to the source code makes open source more secure."
The problems with support was still a number
one priority among users with 37% of IT directors surveyed putting
availability of support as the biggest inhibitor to open source
adoption within their organisations. Taylor believed this is set to
improve.
"Over the last year the only really big
company pushing open source was IBM. Today HP and Sun are also
supporting open source," he said.
Taylor predicted that 2003 would be the year
organisations moved from piloting open source to deploying real
world applications.
"During 2003 we will see a flood of mainstream
open source software usage in both back and front office
applications," he said.
Earlier this month at the Gartner Spring
Symposium in Florence, Gartner research director George Weiss said
that Linux, the open source operating system, was increasing in
maturity as an enterprise platform. There are legions of people in
the Unix community who could now develop and support Linux
deployments, due to the similarities between the two environments,
he said.