Open Source Software Use Driven by Cost Cutting

Innovation and modernizing the technology stack are no longer the top reasons organizations use open source software, according to a new survey.

Instead, what is old is new again, as saving money via overall cost reductions and license costs is the leading reason, cited by 37% of the respondents in the “2024 State of Open Source Report,” the third annual study by OpenLogic by Perforce.

For 31% of respondents, the availability of functionality of existing was cited as a top reason to use open source.

Access to innovations and the latest technologies was the leading reason in the previous two studies, but was mentioned by only 27%, down from 44% in 2021. Other notable trends:

• Modernizing technology stacks fell in importance, going from 37% in 2021 to 20% in 2023.
• The availability of a large selection of options for similar functionality also fell in importance for open source users, going from 31% in 2021 to only 8% in the latest study.

Note that most organizations do make a binary choice to use or not to use all types of open source software. Instead, they usually make decisions to use open source components on a case-by-case basis.

Responses from more than 2,000 participants were included in the survey, which was conducted in October and November.

Innovation Losing Ground as a Motivator

Changes in how the study was conducted may have had an impact on the findings. Last year, the Open Source Initiative joined Perforce’s OpenLogic as a co-sponsor, and this year the Eclipse Foundation became a supporter.

According to Javier Perez, chief open source software evangelist and senior director of product management at Perforce Software, these new partnerships are part of an intentional effort to make the study representative of the global open source community.

In the new report, North America’s share of respondents fell from 51% in 2021, to 30% in 2023. In previous studies, North Americans felt strongest about innovation and were less likely to cite money as a reason to use open source. In this study, North Americans rated cost reduction more often and innovation less often.

A Mixed Picture for Red Hat

Red Hat usage dropped significantly in 2023, likely due to the decision to restrict access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux's (RHEL) code. Since 2021, the use of Red Hat's Fedora distribution fell from 17% to 11%.

Ubuntu Linux distributions may be benefiting, as 46% of organizations use its distribution, up from 36% in 2021.

OpenSUSE, which is building out its own fork of RHEL, also saw a decline from 16% to 10% over the same time period. Furthermore, the adoption of OKD (the open source version of Red Hat's OpenShift platform) fell precipitously from 23% in 2022 to only 9% in 2023.

It is also possible that some of the decline for RHEL and OpenShift came about because Red Hat adoption across Europe is lower than in North America. The drop in OpenShift use shouldn't be seen as a rejection of cloud native technologies, as adoption of Kubernetes actually rose year-over-year.

NGINX and Keycloak on the Rise

Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and OpenStack all saw significant increases in adoption that appear to bring them to usage levels akin to what's been reported in many other studies. Even more interesting are two technologies that saw their usage triple:

• NGINX saw a substantial rise in usage, going from 12% in 2022 to 36% in 2023. Since NGINX was already widely used,  according to Netcraft, the increase find is likely due to increased awareness among survey participants. As we recently reported, there has been dissatisfaction with F5 Networks' management of NGNIX, including an effort to fork the project.
• Keycloak use rose from 3% in 2022 to 10% in 2023 as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation finally accepted it as an incubating project in April 2023 after several years of trying. Keycloak is an identity access management (IAM) project developed primarily by Red Hat. We have previously published a tutorial about how to integrate OpenShift with Keycloak.

Ansible and Terraform saw modest increases, but the market for infrastructure automation and configuration tools may be shrinking. Notably, the results show that:

• Fewer organizations use even one tool to automate and configure infrastructure. In 2023, only 73% use such tools, down from 16% in 2021. This confirms what we saw in a recent JetBrains survey that found that users of these tools fell year-over-year from 80% to 70% among DevOps engineers and infrastructure developers. That study also saw declining usage of Terraform and configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef and Ansible.
• Ansible, which was purchased by Red Hat years ago continues to see increased usage, going from 25% in 2021 to 30% in 2023.
• Terraform adoption also rose slightly, going from 21% in 2021 to 30% in 2023. It appears that the adoption of both tools couldn't sustain the growth among DevOps specialists that was reported four years ago.
• OpenTofu emerged last August in response to Terraform's change to a Business Source License and was quickly added to this year's survey instrument. OpenTofu is a project fork initiated by The Linux Foundation and was used by 8% of all respondents. Some respondents use both Terraform and OpenTofu, so we can't calculate how much the latter has eaten into the former's market share.

Support for Big Software Foundations

Finally, we wanted to highlight an odd finding. Most notably, The Linux Foundation and all of its associated foundations received funding from only 26% of respondents in 2023, down from 40% in 2022. Compared to 2022, two of the open source foundations included in the survey saw an uptick in sponsorship among either the individuals or organizations surveyed. However, the two that did, the Open Source Initiative and the Eclipse Foundation, helped market the survey.

The demographic makeup of the latest survey pool, and specifically the rise in participants from Europe and Asia, may have caused the drops in organizations sponsoring open source nonprofits. In Europe, governments are much more likely to fund open source efforts as compared to elsewhere in the world.

When it comes to corporate support, larger organizations are more likely to help underwrite large foundations, like Linux, while smaller organizations are more likely to back individual open source project maintainers.