Forrester: Europe leads in open-source adoption
France may not have shown up for the Euro 2008 soccer finals, but it continues to demonstrate the most adoption of open-source software, according to a recent report from Forrester Research ("Open Source Adoption: Notes From The Field").
In France, 24 percent of the enterprises surveyed by Forrester are currently using open-source software, with another 15 percent either piloting it or planning to start a pilot within the next year. The United States is at 17 percent adoption, with another 11 percent in near-term pilots. Canada is tied with the States, while Germany, along with France, leads.
At Forrester's IT Forum EMEA 2008, Forrester analyst Diego Lo Giudice and Jeffrey S. Hammond met with application development and enterprise architecture professionals from European firms that are actively using open source software and spoke with them about their open source adoption experiences.
For most of these organizations, open source adoption initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but early success widened the focus to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems.
The professionals that were interviewed said that their firms are interested in expanding open source adoption even further into their organizations and indicated that their firms are less concerned than their North American counterparts about open source security and intellectual property issues.
The research shows that only 45 percent of European companies cited open-source security as a concern, while 71 percent of U.S. and Canadian companies view security as a problem for open source.
Read more about the report from Forrester Research
