The (U.S.) Federal Open Source Alliance, a joint effort of HP, Red Hat and Intel, have conducted and released survey results from what they call the “Federal Open Source Referendum” study. It’s based on 218 responses and was conducted online. That’s pretty thin, depending on how the sample was selected (“online” is a bad sign) and I am trying to get the actual report and survey instrument to better understand the methodology. All the alliance offers on its sort-of web site is a few slides. I can't even find a way to link you to the press release; it came over the Business Wire.
It would be nice to know the job responsibilities of the respondents, what software the respondents use currently, what open source software (OSS) they migrated to or are considering (is it operating infrastructure or applications?), and whether they use OSS without a subscription maintenance contract. The latter is the key marker. Those users—U.S. Federal government or not—that use OSS with a subscription maintenance contract do not really act any different than users acquiring closed-source software from a market dynamics perspective. IT staffs that embrace OSS in the community sense of the word (that is, using mailing lists and bulletin boards for their maintenance support and activiely giving back to the community) are really disruptive to the market. I’m sure that after spending a little time with the actual report, I could probably add some other demographic issues to better interpret the results.
The conclusions weren’t too earthshaking. The lead finding is that “71% of respondents note that their agency can benefit from open source.”
In general, the effort illustrates that the OSS movement needs some strong unbiased time-series market research to help it break out of the perception that it’s a niche IT movement.
-- Most quantitative data aobut OSS either measures revenue, which understates OSS market acceptance because the all-subscription-maintenance revenue model is back-end loaded, or it measures downloads, which overstates OSS market acceptance because a download does not translate into a production instance.
-- Most qualitative research I've seen to date is either sponsored by Microsoft (and not surprisingly finds that OSS has problems) or is sponsored by OSS-centric information-technology (IT) suppliers and finds the opposite.
Ironically maybe the U.S. federal government could solve the problem. It conducts weird research such as how many immigrants from Mongolia have applied for clamming licenses on Lower Cape Cod since the Red Tide scare of 1999. I am making that up so as not to offend anyone other than the very likely small demographic of Northeast U.S. Mongolian-born clam diggers (and the imaginary politician that earmarked the imaginary survey). Perhaps the U.S. Department of Commerce could really dig into the OSS movement. Write your congressperson.
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