The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already
- Reference: 1745929990
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/04/29/state_of_open_source/
- Source link:
The [1]Perforce OpenLogic State of Open Source is an interesting read, which takes some unusual directions quite unlike the more familiar sort of glowingly optimistic industry-sponsored puff pieces. Yes, you will have to provide some contact info to download it, but we reckon it's worth it. It's not overwhelming at 32 pages long. According to the intro, it is "Presented in Collaboration with the [2]Open Source Initiative and the [3]Eclipse Foundation ."
You would expect that such organizations would have a positive view of FOSS in the enterprise. As for the sources of the information:
The 2025 State of Open Source Report is based on an anonymous survey conducted between September 17 and December 20, 2024. The survey received 433 responses from individuals all over the world working with open source software in their organizations.
Of the respondents, about one-third are from Europe, and about as many are in the technology sector.
A lot of the information takes the usual position of strong advocacy that one might expect. Apparently, 96 percent of organizations use FOSS. In the period of this study, between a quarter to a third of them – depending on size – not only increased their use of FOSS, but significantly so. The top stated reason is reducing costs, but others include adoption of cloud, containers, big data, and things like that. No big surprises.
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Reading on, though, we come to some of the more surprisingly chewy lumps in the filling. Just over a quarter of organizations surveyed are still on CentOS, and that means 40 percent of large enterprises. The report doesn't explicitly specify the CentOS Linux distribution, but it's clear that that is what it means. It also doesn't specify what version, but it does note that they are all end-of-life now, so which particular end-of-life version doesn't matter much. We enjoyed the candor too: when asked what their future migration plan was from CentOS Linux, a full quarter of users responded "I don't know."
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Also with refreshing honesty, when asked why, three-quarters of them cited "lack of skills" as the reason.
Some of the other numbers are quite bracing as well. Half of the respondents are hands-on techies. Half of them have more than a thousand servers, and one-third of them have upwards of ten thousand servers. We aren't hearing just from mom-and-pop businesses whose responses aren't representative of enterprise.
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When it comes to distros, the numbers say that nearly 60 percent use Ubuntu and some 30 percent use Debian. CentOS Linux is the third most-used distribution, including in 40 percent of enterprises; overall, 25 percent use CentOS.
(As a side note, when [8]Debian turned 30 a couple of years ago, The Reg FOSS desk published our own estimate of approximate usage numbers from some different surveys, and this matches our numbers gratifyingly well.)
A reasonable question to ask of an organization with a significant deployed estate of an out-of-support OS is what they would do if it was attacked. Nearly 30 percent don't know what they'd do, and 15 percent would "look for a vendor" – which to us means that they don't have one.
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More than a quarter of respondents work with north of 20 vendors – so it's no wonder that the majority cite staying current as their number one problem.
The report is not all about operating systems or Linux distributions. For instance, one section focuses on the use of "big data," where a sobering 47 percent of big data users have low confidence in it. Well, that's good to know. At least they aren't wasting their money on toys.
It also looks at what tools they are using to build their applications, where 53 percent are building in JavaScript. Of them, over 15 percent are using [10]Angular.js , including one-third of large companies.
[11]Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key
[12]Fedora 42 has the Answer, but Ubuntu's Plucky Puffin isn't far behind
[13]Ninite to win it: How to rebuild Windows without losing your mind
[14]How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux
Angular.js means version 1 of [15]Angular , a FOSS JavaScript development framework that Google originally released in 2010. It was superseded by version 2 in 2016, and it went end-of-life in 2022. It's now up to Angular 19, and only the last three versions – 17 (November 2023), 18 (May 2024), and 19 (November 2024) – are still supported at all.
Overall, and somewhat atypically for industry research, the report is quite an interesting read, and we recommend it. However, it does show some worrying trends – if not surprising ones, at least to this jaded industry veteran.
Lots of companies are using open source software, more of them all the time. Most are hoping to save money. The next stated reasons made us chuckle:
To reduce vendor lock-in
Open standards and interoperability
Stable technology with long-term community support
To reduce development or maintenance costs
Number two sort of makes sense, but as for the rest, yeah, good luck with those.
What these organizations are finding is that they choose FOSS with the best of intentions, but once they build things on it, modernizing that stack proves really hard. Training is a big cost center, and companies are willing to pay for support. So much for saving money.
Red Hat seems to have alienated a lot of people by killing CentOS – not merely from its own offerings but potentially from the greater family of distributions. Although RHEL is still significant, the survey did not show an obvious trend towards Alma, or Rocky, or CentOS Stream – let alone a direct move from [16]RHEL to replace CentOS Linux .
A few years ago, The Register [17]described Perforce as "a Minnesota-based maker of DevOps software." Others are less charitable. [18]One voice uncharitably describes its subsidiary thus: "OpenLogic is the firm of a former Microsoft manager, who uses FUD to monetize Free software." Ouch. Even so, and taken with a pinch of salt, it does seem that Linux and geriatric JavaScript frameworks are destined to be the new vast impenetrable, unupgradable, legacy codebase. Who'd have thunk it? ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.openlogic.com/resources/state-of-open-source-report
[2] https://opensource.org/
[3] https://www.eclipse.org/org/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aBFL7U8kYPLX6harNY2ZSQAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aBFL7U8kYPLX6harNY2ZSQAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aBFL7U8kYPLX6harNY2ZSQAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aBFL7U8kYPLX6harNY2ZSQAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/17/debian_turns_30/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aBFL7U8kYPLX6harNY2ZSQAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://angularjs.org/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/26/dos_distraction_free_writing/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/ubuntu_fedora_spring/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/ninite_rebuild_windows/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/windows_10_ltsc/
[15] https://v17.angular.io/guide/what-is-angular
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/lansweeper_centos/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/perforce_puppet_acquisition/
[18] https://techrights.org/wiki/OpenLogic/
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
And we'll have electricity from fusion in 2035.
So . . .
Stallman was right, Raymond was wrong.
Open == Closed with a friendlier name.
I'm not sure I'd put too much weight on names given to versions unless they were specifically asked. If Angular started as Angular.js it might still be that in respondents' minds irrespective of what version they're actually running - "Oh, yes, Angular.js version 19 now you ask".
What would be interesting to know is how the various distros are used. Are they, for instance, running Ubuntu on the desktop and Debian or CentOS on the server?
One impression I get is that in many cases the Linux systems were set up by somebody else who's moved on, maybe a vendor, and have been inherited by people who just know how to keep them going. Because they just keep going, there's nobody tasked with planning replacement or even what to do in an emergency. It all Just Works so it's allowed to drift, run updates, take backups, maybe manage user IDs, It really is saving money.
If you go by name instead of by license type, you may end up getting forked.
Motivations
Admittedly a few years back, I participated in a UK Parliamentary specialist group debate on "open source and open standards". Two things stood out glaringly: [1] many of the participants confused the two, assuming that open source automatically both complied with open standards and drove them, and [2] most of the user base used open source not because the source was open (they didn't look at it) but merely because it was free software. On this basis was hard to see how the original intent of open source could survive intact -- as indeed it seems not to have.
Re: Motivations
Refreshing common sense in your point 2. I have upvoted.
Re: Motivations
The consumers like "free beer," "free speech" is not so important.
Re: Motivations
"assuming that open source automatically both complied with open standards and drove them"
Nevertheless if the source is open it's hard to keep whatever standards it implements closed but closed source rather likes closed standards or, at best, faux open standards.
Modified to hell and gone
A lot of people I see use something open source, then they hit a bug, or it doesn't have a certain feature, so they modify the living hell out of it.
When the next version rolls out, they're screwed because there's now no good migration path.
Did I mention they have no clue that "diff" & "patch" even exist?
Anon b/c I've already sent all the emails to management on how stupid this is
2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop