Open Source lagging behind in the UK

The UK’s adoption of Open Source technology is lagging the US and the rest of Europe, according to a new survey published today by one of the leading new generation Open Source companies Alfresco.

The report called the Open Source Barometer should be an absolutely fasciniating tool as Alfresco plan to issue it every six months. This should give a great insight into trends which are otherwise hard to identify.

The survey was carried out between April and June this year (2007) and the information was garnered from approximately 10,000 new members joining the Alfresco community.

Among the highlights revealed by the Open Source Barometer Report are:

  • Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.
  • Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.
  • Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.
  • Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.

Also, another very interesting result from this survey seems to suggest that Novell’s alliance with Microsoft has done them no favours whatsoever… In fact whilst use of Red Hat Linux has more than doubled, Novell’s Suse Linux has remained flat.

For me one of the key findings is that while the report shows Windows is a popular evaluation platform for open-source software, most enterprises use Linux when they go into production. That says it all really 😉

A fascinating and excellent report from a very high quality company.

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