Open Source: Just the facts, ma'am.

There are a lot of opinion pieces and blogs about the open source, open access, and open data marketplace, which is great – but most managers want to simply know what the facts are. Looking back over the past year, a number of surveys and reports have been issued by various organizations providing hard data about the growing 'open' movement. For example:

• Gartner has reported that on average, 29% of deployed code was open source, and that by 2015 at least 95% of mainstream IT organizations will leverage open source solutions within mission critical software deployments.  See Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone's Building Open-Source Software
• The recent "2012 Linux Jobs Report" prepared by Dice and The Linux Foundation found that the need for open source programming language skills, like Python and Ruby, have hit all-time highs.  They report that there are nearly 2,000 job postings on any given day for personnel skilled in JBoss. Further, job postings for programmers with Android skills and experience are up 33 percent from a year ago. See The Latest on the 'Open Source' Health IT Jobs Market
• In a 2012 online survey of more than 21,000 physicians by Medscape, a healthcare news and information portal owned by WebMD, physicians were asked to rank their EHR systems with regards to ease of use, value and reliability. Topping the list were Amazing Charts, Practice Fusion, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA 'open source' EHR system. See VistA Ranks at Top End of Doctor EHR Satisfaction Survey
• In another report, Gartner revealed that more than half of the organizations surveyed have adopted Open Source Software(OSS) as part of their IT strategy.  See Gartner Open Source Software Survey Reveals OSS Adoption Trends And Initiatives
• Findings from the recent Eclipse Community Survey found that the primary computer language used to develop open source software is Java; that Apache Tomcat continues to be the most popular application server, followed by JBOSS; and that Android and Apple iOS are the dominant mobile operating system targeted by open source developers. See Eclipse Survey 2012

For those wanting to see more statistics about Open Source, there's also a range of  interesting Infographic sites worth examining that provide charts and data on various aspects of the open source movement. For example:

• State of Open Source Adoption
• History of Open Source Software
• Evolution of Open Source
• State of the Open Source Cloud
• Open Text Books

Open Health News provides links to a wide range of other free reports, studies, white papers, and other publications related to open source and eHealth at http://www.openhealthnews.com/resources

Also check out the reports & studies posted on COSI 'Open' Health.