The TODO Group is thrilled to announce the first Open Source Program Management Survey for 2018 (in partnership with The New Stack) that examines the prevalence and outcomes of open source programs among the Global Fortune 2000, including the key benefits and barriers to adoption. We have open sourced all of our survey results and graphics.
Key findings include:
- Open source use has become commonplace among tech and non-tech companies alike with 72% of companies frequently using open source for non-commercial or internal reasons and 55% using open source for commercial products.
- Open source programs are very critical or extremely critical to the success of engineering and product teams according to 59% of respondents.
- The top three benefits of managing an open source program are awareness of open source usage/dependencies, increased developer agility/speed, and better license compliance.
- Large companies are about twice as likely to run an open source program than smaller companies (63 percent vs. 37 percent).
- Open source programs tend to start informally as a working group or a few key open source developers and then evolve into formal programs over time, typically within a company’s software engineering or development department (about 41 percent of programs).
- The benefits of an open source program are widely known, with 70% of those without a program believing it would have a positive impact in their company, despite any barriers to creating it.
As an organization, we are committed to advancing the state of open source program management across the industry and will be performing this survey on an annual basis moving forward. We look forward to community feedback on this survey and how we can improve it in the future.
If you’re interested in starting an open source program or collaborating with your peers in open source program management, please consider joining the TODO Group!