Use of proprietary software is 'plummeting', finds Red Hat report

Red Hat's annual research report The State of Enterprise Open Source has found a big rise in the use of enterprise open-source software, and, to a lesser extent, community-based open-source solutions, at the expense of proprietary systems.

Last year, respondents from around the globe indicated that about 55 per cent of their software was proprietary but this figure has dropped 42 per cent in 2020. It is predicted to decline still further to just 32 per cent in the next two years.

Source: Red Hat

Red Hat does not define exactly it means by ‘enterprise open-source', but makes a distinction with community-based projects in that it is ‘rigorously supported enterprise software'.

Enterprise open-source software is being most widely used for IT infrastructure modernisation, application development and DevOps, finds the report. Supporting this general finding, recent Computing research into DevOps CI/CD tools for Delta founds that 75 per cent were using open-source or open-core (open-source with proprietary add-ons) tools for managing software production.

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In terms of specific applications, enterprise open-source is most used in security, cloud management, database and big data and analytics solutions, according to Red Hat.

Interestingly, the cost advantage (while enterprise open-source vendors charge for support it is typically less expensive than proprietary equivalents) was ranked second this year, for the first time, its place at the top taken by ‘higher quality software'. This represents a major shift in opinion over the years from when open-source software was considered to be rough around the edges. Indeed, the vast majority of respondents said they believe open-source software is "used by the most innovative companies".

The biggest riser in the advantages ranking, moving from eighth place last year to fourth this, was "designed to work in cloud, cloud-native technologies", giving a clue as to one of the major drivers for adopting open-source software: the general migration of applications out of the data centre and into the cloud. Eighty-three per cent said open-source has been "instrumental in my organisation's ability to take advantage of cloud architectures".

In particular, 56 per cent of respondents expected their use of containers, a key cloud-native technology, to increase over the next 12 months.