The Open Source Initiative and OpenLogic by Perforce jointly produced this year's State of Open Source Report. The report received a total of 2,660 respondents of all sizes from every continent (except Antarctica) and almost every industry.

They shared their top ten takeaways from the report:

1. 77% of respondents increased the use of open source software in their organizations over the last 12 months, and 36.5% indicated that they increased the use significantly.
2. 79% of respondents sponsor open source organizations.
3. The #1 reason to use open source software is the access to innovation, thus pushing cost reduction to a second place. Security and availability of patches also ranked high.
4. The #1 barrier in adopting open source software is the lack of internal skills to test, use, integrate, and support.
5. The #1 support challenge with open source software across all industries is personnel experience and proficiency.
6. The highest overall increase in use went to open source DevOps tooling. Cloud-native CI/CD tools saw a significant increase in adoption.
7. The most desirable new technologies are containers and Kubernetes. Only 18% of the respondents use Kubernetes today, 39% have a cloud strategy, and 29% have a containerization strategy.
8. The highest among all organization sizes, 41% of small organizations have an open source strategy.
9. The banking, insurance, and financial services industries have the highest number of Innersource projects.
10. Only 13% of organizations have a legal team familiar with open source licensing.

Our takeaways from the survey

Here at OSPOCO, we deal with companies who are implementing or expanding their open source capabilities, so we see a different slice of the industry. So in addition to the ten points above, we also had a few things that jumped out at us.

If you have an OSPO, you're ahead of the game

We already knew that open source was growing. But for such a ubiquitous technology, it is surprising how few organizations have a structured program and office to help them manage their use of open source. Only 15% of organizations surveyed had an Open Source Program Office, and even fewer (13%) had legal counsel familiar with and ready to help with open source questions. That is in spite of open source being a key part of every organization's technical and intellectual property strategy.

Finding and developing people is the #1 challenge

When looking at the responses across different industry sectors, we saw that the primary challenge is not the technologies, but the human factors in open source. 23% of respondents said "Not enough personnel" was their biggest challenge, and 56% of respondents said that "Personnel experience and proficiency" was what they were most concerned about.

Security is on everyone's mind

One of the themes of the past couple years has been the development of open source security as a focus for open source use and tooling. Keeping up with "Security and patches" was the most important task for 27% of organizations. However, only about 30% of respondents said they included security scans to identify vulnerabilities in open source packages and just 22% of respondents said that they were using open source security tools. Those are numbers that we hope will go up - our recommendation is always to implement open source scanning as quickly as possible.

Read it for yourself

We mirrored a copy of the 2022 State of Open Source survey on our site if you want to take a look - you can download it here.

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The 2022 State of Open Source Report and the "Top Ten Takeaways" were provided by the Open Source Initiative under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and used by permission.