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http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=9532EC62-BAC5-485E-9ABD-2065F1861E0B
Oracle
users catching on to open source
24th October 2007 By Tony Baer The
Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has released its latest member survey
on the use of open source, with the results indicating not surprisingly that
acceptance remains guarded but rising.
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"When open source first came out,
there were concerns about not having a 'real' company behind it," said
IOUG president
The IOUG survey, conducted by Unisphere
Research and sponsored by MySQL, revealed over a
third of the 200+ respondents were using an open source database; given that
the survey polled Oracle customers, that meant that respondents were deploying MySQL or similar open source alternatives in addition,
rather than in place of Oracle.
The survey explored the impact of freebie "Express"
editions that are now being made available by Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft to
encourage new customers to kick the wheels. The survey revealed that nearly 80%
of "Express" database users are still using open source counterparts.
Interestingly, the number of organizations running over half of
their applications on open source grew from 9% last year to 13% in the current
survey. By far, the driver remains cost, with freedom from vendor lock-in being
a very distant second.
But adoption of open source remains a mile wide and, at best, a
few inches deep. Although over 90% reported using at least some open source
software, barely 4% used it for enterprise applications such as SugarCRM or Alfresco portal. Not surprisingly, most open
source software was primarily confined to dedicated uses, such as middleware,
or for test and development.
And, not surprisingly, most open source database users still
view these systems as comparative toys. Only 20% of open source database users
stored more than 50 GBytes within them, and only 3% reported
storing over a terabyte.
The use of open source, or in this case, Linux, has actually
been encouraged by Oracle, which has made Linux is reference development
platform. As one survey respondent was quoted, "Oracle 11g beta releases
were available for Linux before they were available for other platforms."
The Apache web server proved the single most popular open source
middleware component, used by 60% of respondents. It was followed by OSs such as Linux or FreeBSD at 58%; appservers
such as JBoss or Tomcat at 45%; databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or EnterpriseDB at 35%; development tools such as Eclipse or NetBeans at 30%; and frameworks such as Spring at 21%. By
comparison, only 9% indicated that they didn't use open software at this time.
But just over half the group said they would increase use of
open source software over the next year, with nearly 70% citing cost savings as
the reason for their interest.
The prime obstacles weren't that surprising. Just over half the
respondents cited poorer support compared to commercial software packages,
which comprised an increase over last year when only about a third of
respondents voiced these concerns. But there were some interesting patterns
here, with larger organizations citing support, while smaller organizations
said that security was their prime concern.
Our View
It's clear that when it comes to open source, customers are
"buying' it for one plain reason: cost. Consequently, adoption patterns,
where open source is deployed for piece of software architecture that are
commodity is no longer surprising.
Specifically,
they are focusing on software plumbing that is simply supposed to work, and on
its own adds little intrinsic value. One of the obvious places is the operating
system, for which customers view as being a means to an end. Conversely, the
fact that customers still pay lots of money for Windows clients (the one
portion of the tier where open source penetration has remained limited) is not
because they are paying for the OS itself. Instead, they are paying for access
to Microsoft Office, which has become a de facto standard in the developed
world.
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