Open Source Adoption: Notes From The Field

At Forrester's IT Forum EMEA 2008, we met with application development and enterprise architecture professionals from European firms that are actively using open source software and spoke with them about their open source adoption experiences. For most of these organizations, open source adoption initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but early success widened the focus to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems. The professionals we spoke with said that their firms are interested in expanding open source adoption even further into their organizations and indicated that their firms are less concerned than their North American counterparts about open source security and intellectual property issues.