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Survey Underscores Issues Involved in Adopting Open Source Tools

By Mini Swamy
TMCnet Contributor

Sonatype conducted its annual Software Development Infrastructure survey and announced its findings based on answers from over, 1,600 software developers, architects and managers across all industries, company sizes and geographic regions. According to company officials, software development organizations rely on Sonatype to deliver better software faster, while adhering to internal standards and policies. It the becomes incumbent on the company to deliver innovative solutions and also identify the issues that bother corporate software development organizations.

Survey findings indicated that open source development infrastructure was being adopted widely as it helped improve productivity and reduce costs. In fact, almost 83 percent of the respondents claimed that they were using open source tools. However, developers claim that lack of tool integration was a stumbling block that limited developer productivity and team efficiency.

Another issue that needed to be tackled was the lack of central control over the use of open source components. For instance, Maven Central, the primary cloud-based repository for open source components was being accessed by more than 40,000 organizations and many large enterprises were downloading more than 100,000 components every month, indicating that open source components were becoming critical building blocks in software development. The lack of visibility in component selection, deployment and standardization implied that corporations had only limited control over how these components were selected or used.

Charles Gold, chief marketing officer at Sonatype summed it up succinctly and said, “Our survey results confirm what we’ve been hearing from our customers for some time. Enterprise adoption is there, in fact, it’s huge. The real issue is how to maximize productivity and reuse without incurring unnecessary risk. This is our focus at Sonatype.”