SAN FRANCISCO, USA: North Bridge Venture Partners has announced the results of its annual Future of Open Source Survey.

Conducted in partnership with The 451 Group, the 2011 survey involved more than 20 industry collaborators and polled a wide variety of members of the open source community on the important issues, opportunities and expectations of the industry for 2011 and beyond.

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The results of the survey, now in its fifth year, reveal that open source is now fully embraced by both the public and private sectors, and is being implemented across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data.

Survey responses also show that the future is bright for open source. Emerging technology segments such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), private cloud, public cloud, and mobile are driving growth in open source.

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Key findings:

* Respondents have identified SaaS, cloud and mobile as the main areas that will have a dramatic impact on open source and that are driving growth.
* In 2010 there were 3,800 new open source based projects in mobile, with 94 percent targeting Android and Apple iOS, more than double the number in 2009.
* Their are now more than 470 open source projects targeting cloud computing.