The results of the 2010 Future of Open Source survey were presented at last week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, and here are they are in slide format:
While I was at the presentation I captured a few additional tidbits from the presentation that weren’t in the slides. The continued growth of open-source generally was a prevalent theme. For example, did you know that more than 19,000 open-source projects were initiated in 2009? The growth of open-source software in the commercial sector was also noted, and the promotion of open-source projects by commercial open-source companies was cited as a factor. (REvolution Computing promoting the R Project was one example given.) The other theme I spotted was innovation: while lowering costs is still the #1 ranked feature of open-source, access to new methods and the rapid pace of innovation in FOSS compared to proprietary software is now being listed as a critical reason to switch.
R blogger Tal Galili has some other insights on the survey results, from an R user’s perspective. I recommend checking them out.
