Black Duck's Dave Gruber And Peter Vescuso: Open Source Is Maturing

"We are seeing rapid adoption of open source software as well as open source management principles in the enterprise. 2012 showed a significant uptick over 2011, with enterprise more than doubling. That is an indication of the maturing of the open source market and the interest in it. The tech companies - the smartphone and software guys -- have always been huge users of open source."

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux.

On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known for much different reasons. Its practices have become a path to secure, rapid product development with many inherent cost-saving features. The open source business model has seen an impressive growth spurt in the last five years.