The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

The good news: everyone's using it. The bad news: have you seen how they're using it?

OpenLogic's 2025 State of Open Source Report offers a slightly different perspective on modern corporate adoption of FOSS – and it's not a reassuring one.

The 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 Open Source Initiative and the 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.

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."

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.

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 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.

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 Angular.js, including one-third of large companies.

Angular.js means version 1 of 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 RHEL to replace CentOS Linux.

A few years ago, The Register described Perforce as "a Minnesota-based maker of DevOps software." Others are less charitable. 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? ®