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April 25, 2013

Survey Reveals Free and Open Source Software Poses Problems for Most Businesses

By Kasey Schefflin-Emrich, TMCnet Contributing Writer

Free and Open Source (News - Alert) Software may be prominent among businesses nowadays, but that doesn't mean it’s always reliable.



According to a recent online survey from automation and management software provider Univa (News - Alert), 76 percent of enterprises reported using FOSS internally while 75 percent said they had problems using the software in their mission-critical departments, such as engineering and R and D.

Problems that were reported with FOSS included a lack of enterprise-grade support, usability and maintenance issues, crashes, bugs, downtime, loss of productivity and issues with interoperability.

To combat these problems, 64 percent of businesses said they would pay for supported software. More specifically, 25 percent cited stability as a reason to pay, 22 percent cited enterprise-grade support, 20 percent cited ease of use, 18 percent cited extra functionality, 15 percent cited bug reports and fixes, and 13 percent cited integrated solution, product upgrades and predictable lifecycles.

"We have always said that users are willing to pay for quality when it comes to Open Source software, and the results of the survey have confirmed as such," Gary Tyreman (News - Alert), CEO of Univa, said. "A large number of organizations use Open Source Grid Engine as a key ingredient in product development, but as the company grows they can't afford to rely on unsupported Open Source Grid Engine. That is when they can turn to us for peace of mind, scalability and reliability provided by our team and proven Univa Grid Engine."

In related news, high-performance and agile database storage solution provider Tokutek recently revealed that it has made the source code for the latest version of its MySQL storage engine TokuDB available for free under the GPL License v2.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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