Security concerns open source adoption

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Palamida, the leader in application security for open source, today released the results of a new poll, finding that 75 percent of organizations expect their IT budget to decrease either moderately or significantly in 2009, but that only 45 percent view open source as a likely solution to the upcoming budget gap.

While this result may seem surprising in light of today’s economic pressures, the fact that 50 percent of respondents cite security as the number one concern around additional open source adoption could indicate the cause.

The Palamida web poll was conducted between November 13 and November 21, 2008 and included 177 respondents in senior IT, engineering, and security positions.

Survey requests were evenly distributed across financial services, insurance, technology, consumer goods and services, biotech/pharmaceutical, manufacturing, healthcare, energy and government. Response was concentrated in the financial and insurance sectors.

The poll also found a very positive perception of open source software functionality and quality, with 62.7 percent of organizations believing that open source software is either equal or almost equal to their commercial counterparts. This countered the list of concerns, which in addition to security, included support costs and intellectual property risks as top three concerns around open source use.

“In challenging economic times, internal application development teams absolutely should be turning to open source to deliver higher quality software and Web applications with fewer resources,” said Mark Tolliver, Palamida CEO.

He added: “Open source use is flourishing inside of organizations, with applications built in the last five years, typically composed of 50 percent or more open source content. Our experience is that open source communities are typically very responsive to finding and fixing reported security problems, and that, coupled with a proactive process for open source management via composition analysis, should reduce security concerns.”