By jonturk | August 24, 2010

From 2008 to 2009, open source development projects grew significantly, according to recent research released by a major software company. Those application developers or teams turning toward the open forum increased by 70 percent during that 12-month stretch.

The company, whose products are aimed at accelerating software development through managed use of open source software, analyzed nearly 400 projects that were intended for enabling enterprise IT application development for cloud computing. By analyzing these projects, the company identified the many cloud environments being used by developers. Of these hosted development environments, Amazon led all in terms of service, followed by Microsoft's Azure, Google Apps Engine and Force.com.

"When we began the analysis we expected to find projects focused on security, privacy and management," said the company's executive vice president. "The variety of projects that self-identify as 'cloud' is much broader in scope, reflecting the sophistication of the cloud application ecosystem and confirming the importance of OS cloud software developed to support the needs of enterprise IT."

The company's research also found that the cloud-specific open source projects, such as those developing SaaS applications, it analyzed represented nearly 50 million lines of code.

"In the wake of the financial crisis of the past 18 to 24 months and as enterprise IT application developers re-architect applications for cloud environments, they are turning to open source software for its low cost, availability and breadth of possible solutions," said Melinda-Carol Ballou, the program director of application life-cycle management and executive strategies at IDC. "Open source's low barriers to entry and abundance offer significant time-to-market advantages and make it an emerging and important element of cloud development strategies for enterprise developers. At the same time, organizations must put in effective open source assessment and management capabilities to leverage it as part of a complex software sourcing strategy for the cloud and for other environments."

Open source software has become a preference for many organizations based upon Ballou's explanation especially as more companies have started specializing in open source software development. A recent survey conducted by an open source software developer Zenoss found 98 percent of responding corporations indicated that they currently use open source software. Furthermore, 71 percent of respondents stated open source software is easier to deploy now, whereas 48 percent felt the same way in 2008 and 38 percent in 2007's survey.