Open source software is slowly but surely conquering the corporate segment, as evidenced by the RedHat research team. The company conducted a survey among 950 executives of IT companies around the world. Of these, 400 people work in the United States, 250 in Latin America, 150 in the UK, and another 150 in English-speaking companies in the Asia-Pacific region. According to the survey, RedHat came to the conclusion that open source software is crowding out proprietary solutions from their historical market – from the Enterprise segment.

Here’s how managers rated the importance of open source software as part of the study:

By the way, the numbers for understanding the importance of open source software are only growing from year to year: in 2019, as part of the same survey, 89% of respondents named important or very important open source development, it means, an increase of 6% per year.

Also, 77% of respondents believe that the share of open source software on the market will only grow. Given the frightening reputation of “technology far from technology”, open source – systems based on the Linux kernel – as complex, unfriendly and extremely specific, a 77% rating among management is an excellent indicator. At the same time, 22% of those polled say that the open source market will not grow already and only 1% believes that it will decrease.

It is important to note that according to RedHat research, the share of proprietary software in the corporate segment has been decreasing for several years, and at a serious pace. According to the 2019 report, the share of closed solutions was 55% of all software used by the business. Now this figure has decreased to 42%, and according to the forecasts and opinion of respondents, by 2021 the volume of proprietary software used will be reduced to 32%.

An interesting observation is that, according to 86% of respondents, the most innovative companies in their fields use open source software. It turns out that the most advanced software is open source?

In fact, this statement is not so far from the truth, if you pay attention to the actions of some large companies and their relationship with the open source software community over the past decade. Back in 2014, Tesla transferred all of its patents related to the design and construction of electric vehicles to the public. In 2018, Microsoft transferred 60,000 of its patents to the open source category to protect Linux. We think to remind that MS is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation and actively supports the Open Source movement (which is surprising, because historically Microsoft has been an antagonist of the free software movement and Linux in particular) – it’s not worth it.

It is also surprising that the main advantage of open source against the background of proprietary solutions is that managers call a higher quality open source product against a similar closed solution. Lower cost is only the second reason for choosing open source. The following are the reasons from the field of information security, the adaptability to work with cloud systems and only the last, fifth argument – the absence of a threat to get a lawsuit.

Open source also crowds out proprietary solutions from their classic niches: information security, working with databases and big data.

The increase in trust in open security solutions is especially indicative: by the end of the decade, business stopped seeing evil hackers who pick their Linux kernels and dream of stealing their data through backdoors in open software, and began to trust open source products more than proprietary ones.

The business is now worried not by conditional hackers under the guise of developers, but by the quality of the code of open source products. The main barriers to a full transition to open source software are called by managers the main diseases of open source software: doubts about the quality of the code base, poor support, compatibility with the already built infrastructure, and lack of qualification of employees in the company for such a transition.

Respondents shared their plans for software infrastructure for the next two years. So, almost a third of companies will follow the golden rule of “ work – do not touch”, what means, they will leave everything as it is and continue to use proprietary software products in the future, as they perform their functions and do not need to change anything. In the next 24 months, 17% of companies plan to send legacy programs to the scrap, because they can’t cope with modern tasks. The remaining 52% of respondents said that in one form or another they would update the software fleet in terms of upgrading or transferring software to cloud rails.

Of course, the RedHat study can be considered partly biased, since the results obtained are obviously beneficial to this company. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny the general trend of transition to open source products and the growing influence of the entire open source movement on the industry. The penetration rate of Linux systems in the server environment is close to 100%, the Linux Foundation is actively supported by many companies, including the giant of the corporate market – Microsoft. Open source projects are actively developing by other giants, for example, Google, which for many years gives access to the Chromium engine for everyone.

There are many examples, so there is no reason to doubt the results of the RedHat study too much.