While it's nice to think that large swathes of tech journalists are suddenly supporting open source, much of the reason for all this good press can be attributed to a number of positive research reports from the likes of IDC and Gartner. These industry analysts have been busy investigating open source adoption over the past year and have been publishing interesting results.

As long ago as June 2008, Gartner surveyed 274 enterprise companies globally and found that 85% had already adopted open source, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so within the next year. Forrester's April 2009 report "Open Source Software Goes Mainstream" questioned 2000 software decision makers. The report concluded that open source has risen to the top of the executive agenda, with the author noting that "the mandate's coming from higher up".

This is a major change for open source, which historically has entered organisations from below the executive radar using a bottom-up approach. It was likely deployed by IT and programming teams, gradually gaining traction through the organisation, and often becoming widespread before the CIO even knew it existed.

The other big news in open source adoption has been in the move 'up the stack' into applications. Open source has gained massive popularity in server software in the past decade but is increasingly moving into end-user applications.

An October 2008 study by Forrester interviewed 132 senior business and IT executives from large companies in Europe that are already using open source products. They found that 45% of all companies that are leveraging open source use it for mission-critical applications. More interestingly, they found that while open source infrastructure adoption was widespread, there was a much larger and longer- term opportunity for open source applications in productivity tools, messaging / groupware, ERP, Business Intelligence, CRM, and Content Management.

Open source company results

Kineo took a look around the industry and picked some of the highlights from the 2009 Q1 open source company reports.

• Enterprise content management vendor Alfresco reported 20% growth quarter over quarter in June 2009.
• Open source code management company Blackduck reported year on year growth of 42 percent in bookings and 27 percent in services.
• Actuate's BIRT business analytics business showed a year on year increase of 32% and expects its BIRT-related business to increase by 30% overall this year.
• Funambol's mobile open source community has grown 2,000 percent, downloads are up 34 percent, and the number of active Funambol servers is up 42 percent.
• MuleSource community membership grew 350 percent in one year.
• Java application framework vendor Springsource announced year-end results to April 2009 that included tripling their support revenue and increasing subscription bookings by 230%. They also acquired Hyperic in order to create a full product suite for Java application development, allowing it to go head to head with IBM and Microsoft.
• Open source solutions provider and Linux company Redhat posted year-end results to Feb 2009 that included 25% total revenue increase and 20% subscription revenue increase.