UK reticence to open source

According to a survey conducted by Actuate:

The UK shows little change since last year with just over two fifths (42.1%) already using open source software. Significantly the UK continues to demonstrate a degree of reticence towards open source adoption with almost a quarter (22.4%) still monitoring developments but not yet evaluating.

This contrasts with France where more than two thirds of those surveyed are actively using open source. I’m not surprised given the broad publicity given to the use of open source at institutions like the French Gendarmerie. The survey restricted its UK participants to financial services and public sector. I wonder whether the results would have been different if the responding pool had been more widely drawn.

However, there is an interesting side note from public sector where: “The proportion perceiving vendor independence as a major benefit of open source has shown an increase year-on-year.” According to the results, that proportion has climbed significantly from 37% to 52% in the last three years. An understanding of negative perceptions is always valuable. In the next chart, you can see the reasons given are many and varied:

If you’ve looked at open source, what are your perceptions?

Tagged as: Open source, Public sector