Most businesses that embrace open source are content to consume products rather than giving code back to the community, according to Forrester Research.
Forrester talked to application development and enterprise architecture professionals from European firms that are actively using open source, at its symposium in Lisbon last month.
It found that for most of the organizations it questioned, “open source adoption initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but early success widened the focus to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems.”
Lower cost was the main driver for open source deployments with delegates questioned by Forrester highlighting that the cost-based business case was easier to show for lower-level commodity middleware components.
“One participant mentioned that his organization saved