Independence and security

The main reasons for using OSS in the corporate environment are open standards, cost savings, and greater independence and security. This is the conclusion of a study by SwissICT and the Swiss Open Systems User Group.

Trust continues to grow

On behalf of the not-for-profit industry association SwissICT and the independent association /ch/open - Swiss Open Systems User Group, the University of Bern surveyed 38 public authorities, 98 ICT companies and 64 companies and organizations from other industries.

The most interesting result: the obstacles to the introduction of open source software have shifted significantly in the direction of the company's own IT landscape.

This means that it is not problems with the solution itself, such as a lack of functionality or migration difficulties, that keep companies from switching to open source software, but rather the lack of interfaces and dependencies with proprietary systems.

So the reasons lie in the existing infrastructure of the companies and not in open source!

Compared to previous studies conducted by the two organizations, the following arguments in particular have lost a great deal of importance that spoke against the use of OSS:

License uncertainties, reputation of the software, user acceptance, lack of internal expertise, and inadequate training offerings. This is evidence that familiarity with OSS and open source communities continues to increase, while uncertainties decrease.

Companies now attach far less importance to any implementation problems with open source software than they did a few years ago. For the most part, OSS is used in infrastructure applications, for example for web servers, databases, server operating systems, content management systems and application and portal servers, as well as in cloud computing.

The latter area in particular has seen a particularly sharp increase in use of 42 percent compared to the last survey in 2012.

High importance of services

As the most important reasons for using open source, the companies surveyed cite flexibility in designing their IT by adhering to open standards, cost savings and reduced dependency on suppliers (vendor lock-in) - in other words, the classic advantages of open source software over proprietary solutions.

The participants also agree on the question of the most urgently needed services in the open source environment: According to the survey, the four most important services are the delivery of (automated) security updates, the assumption of warranty, the existence of documentation and the assumption of maintenance and support.

Arrived in the mainstream

What is interesting here is that these points apply equally to non-open source projects! This is further proof that OSS has arrived in the IT mainstream and is hardly different from closed software anymore.