Survey: 98 Percent of Companies Use Open-Source, 29 Percent Contribute Back

In a survey released earlier this month by Accenture, it was found that two-thirds of all participating organizations intend to ramp-up their open-source investments in 2010. The number dovetails nicely with survey results released a few days ago by Zenoss, an open-source software developer, which note that 98 percent of all enterprise companies are using open-source software in some capacity.

That's all well and good, right? Well, one little number in Accenture's results puts a little rain on the open-source parade: only 29 percent of those using open-source in the enterprise sector plan to contribute their own developmental efforts back to the larger open-source community. Which, it itself, goes against the very definition of open-source.

Now, that's not the legal definition of open-source as required by the licensing that accompanies any given open-source project. Such contracts often stipulate that an entity must include the source code alongside any compiled program, or at least make it available for one to download from an easily accessible location—but that's only if an open-source program is being released to the public.

As far as most common licenses go, one can make modifications to an open-source program and keep the new application private without penalty. That said, it also removes one from taking full advantage of the entire point of open-source software to begin with.

"If an enterprise modifies an open-source project and doesn't contribute back those changes — and work to get those changes accepted into the main code body — then it is left to maintain that software on its own," writes Matt Asay, COO of Canonical.

"Not only does this raise the cost of maintenance on the software, but it also potentially eliminates — or, at least, minimizes — the benefits of code reliability and quality," he adds.

That said, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin doesn't consider a community-less charge through open-source waters to be a situation that a company can ultimately keep going for long. All roads lead back to the communal benefits provided by the share-and-share-like mantra of open source.

Unless you're Google, that is—the company has been squabbling amongst the hierarchy of Linux maintainers in an effort to get Android APIs integrated into the main Linux kernel. The company recently won a partial victory in getting Android's "wake locks" features integrated, though one still can't ultimately run Android using the Linux kernel. In essence, argued kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman earlier this year, Google has forked Android.

"Google, for its part, isn't gushing to Accenture about software-maintenance cost savings, and almost certainly feels that it can deliver equal or greater reliability and quality than can the core Linux kernel development community," Asay writes.

According to the survey, 76 percent of respondents consider quality—not price—to be open-source's major selling point. Closely behind that, at 71 percent, is an open-source application's improved reliability and, at 70 percent, stronger security and bug fixes.