Enterprise Open-Source Software (OSS) adoption is accelerating across company sizes
Open-source software is scaling at full speed across the enterprise spectrum. Whether you’re leading a company with 50 employees or 50,000, chances are your teams are either using OSS or planning to expand its footprint. According to the Perforce 2025 State of Open-Source Report, a striking 96% of organizations increased or maintained their OSS use over the past year. Even more telling: 68% of enterprises with over 5,000 employees showed notable growth in OSS adoption.
The reason is straightforward. Open-source gives you faster evolution. It helps companies move quickly without reinventing the wheel every time tech changes. OSS is especially critical in frontier areas like big data and artificial intelligence. These are areas where your team can’t afford to lag. You need technologies that adapt at the pace of innovation.
Cost reduction is the primary driver behind OSS adoption
Of course, money talks. And in the world of open-source, it talks louder every year. The 2025 report from Perforce makes this crystal clear, 53.33% of companies chose OSS for one key reason: no licensing costs or overall cost savings. That’s up from 37% the year before. When economic conditions tighten, nobody wants to write checks for things they can build smarter with community-backed tools.
This is happening in places under real pressure to balance innovation and budget. In the government sector, 92% said cost control drove OSS adoption. Retail followed at 67%, banking at 62%, and telecoms at 60%. In those industries, shaving costs while keeping technology modernized is a live challenge. OSS makes it doable.
There are other good reasons to go open, avoiding vendor lock-in, improving interoperability, reducing dev and maintenance costs, but they’re trailing cost by a wide margin. What this tells leaders is clear: OSS gives you more bend in your tech spine. You aren’t tied to slow vendor cycles or outdated pricing models. You build what you want, when you want, and if you’re smart, your engineers contribute back to the projects you’re betting on. That’s how the loop stays tight and your systems stay fast.
Investment in OSS is focused on cloud technologies, data platforms, and development tools
According to Perforce’s 2025 report, 39.52% of organizations are putting their OSS budget into cloud and container technologies. Another 33.33% are focusing on databases and data tech. And 32.86% are investing directly in programming languages and development frameworks.
This is a strong signal. It means companies are embedding open source deeper into the foundation of their systems. They’re customizing infrastructure, deploying in containers, scaling out data platforms, and developing tools in-house. Smaller companies are leading the charge in language and framework investment, showing strong momentum in customizing how they deploy code. Larger enterprises are leaning into analytics and DevOps-specific tooling, where mature OSS ecosystems exist and talent is easier to source.
The takeaway here for C-suite leaders is simple: open source isn’t limited to saving money on software licenses. It’s evolving into a long-term strategy to control the direction of your technology environment. If you want flexibility, speed, and the ability to respond to market demands without being boxed in, these OSS investments position your company to move faster and smarter. What’s more, they make internal teams more capable of quick iteration and cross-functional collaboration.
The continued use of End-of-Life (EOL) software presents risks
A lot of companies are still running software that isn’t supported anymore. That’s a problem. The report shows 25.96% of organizations are still using CentOS, even though all versions are now officially end-of-life. This issue is even more pronounced in large enterprises, where that number jumps to 40%.
Without updates, those systems are vulnerable. You’re open to security failures, performance issues, and audit violations. In fact, enterprises using EOL software like CentOS or AngularJS are nearly three times more likely to fail compliance audits.
Worse, many companies have no concrete plan for dealing with it. Among CentOS users, 28% haven’t defined how they’ll respond to newly disclosed security threats. Among the largest enterprises, 38% are in the same position. One-quarter haven’t decided how or when they’ll migrate away, and 43% of those say migration will take over six months. That’s a long time to stay exposed.
The most popular exit plan today is Ubuntu, chosen by 30.19% of respondents. Still, 15% of all companies and 25% of large enterprises don’t know what their next step is. That kind of indecision doesn’t scale well with real-world outages or CVE reports that require rapid response.
C-suite executives need to look at these numbers and act. Running EOL systems creates measurable business risk. Compliance, uptime, and team efficiency all depend on moving forward decisively. Planning migrations, patch workflows, and replacement systems are leadership responsibilities, not just technical ones.
Challenges related to security, compliance, and patch management are hindering OSS utilization
Open-source software gives you speed and flexibility, but it comes with real operational challenges. The top issues reported by organizations using OSS are keeping up with updates and patches (63.81%), meeting security and compliance requirements (60%), and maintaining unsupported or end-of-life (EOL) software (58.57%).
When patches fall behind, your surface area for attack grows. When your stack includes outdated components, you’re exposed to vulnerabilities that won’t be fixed. And when security and compliance processes aren’t tight, you leave the door open for audit failures and reputational damage.
This isn’t exclusive to EOL software. Even actively maintained OSS projects can be difficult to monitor without the right systems. Open-source moves fast. New releases, breaking changes, emerging vulnerabilities, they all require teams that are structured to respond quickly. Organizations that don’t invest in proper oversight find themselves lagging behind, and often paying for it later.
If OSS is part of your infrastructure, and for most businesses, it is, then patching, updating, and compliance support need to be funded and prioritized. You wouldn’t leave a server unmonitored or neglect encryption standards. Don’t ignore OSS hygiene either. Treat it as part of your core governance, not a side task for IT.
Skill shortages are constraining effective OSS management, particularly in emerging technologies
You can’t scale open-source success without the right people. And right now, too many companies don’t have them. The Perforce report shows nearly half (47%) of organizations working with big data say they lack confidence in their ability to manage these systems. More than 75% of them pointed directly to talent shortages and internal skills gaps.
This pattern holds strong across other modern tech areas. Take containerization. Docker is used by 59.30% of respondents. Kubernetes use has doubled since 2021 to 39.20%. But more than 50% say their biggest challenge with these tools is a lack of personnel or experience.
Open-source ecosystems evolve fast. If your developers and engineers aren’t learning at the same pace, performance will hit limits. Configuration mistakes happen. Architectures stall. Security gaps widen. Organizations trying to scale OSS in complex spaces, cloud-native, data-driven, or distributed environments, need more than just licenses. They need talent that understands how to deploy, manage, and continually improve these systems.
Most companies are addressing the gap through internal training (49.52%). Others are hiring specialist contractors (30.95%) or working with third-party vendors (25.24%). All of these are valid moves. But they require executive-level commitment and follow-through. Having strong OSS capabilities in-house makes the difference between holding a strategy together and struggling to stay operational under pressure.
For leadership, the key message is clear. OSS value doesn’t come just from code, it comes from people who know how to use it. Invest in them early, and your organization won’t need to wait on outside help every time the landscape shifts.
The absence of professional support
Not every team wants to run open-source software without a safety net. One of the biggest reasons companies don’t fully embrace “pure” OSS is linked to support. According to the 2025 Perforce report, 44.29% of respondents said the lack of professional support and maintenance was the primary factor keeping them on proprietary or vendor-supported versions of OSS.
This is an operational decision, not just a technical one. When teams face outages, bugs, or security issues, they need guaranteed assistance. If there’s no in-house expertise or enterprise-grade support plan, the smart move, at least for short-term stability, is to use OSS backed by vendors that offer 24/7 service, defined SLAs, and escalation paths.
For leadership, this means you need clarity on where your risk tolerance sits. If you’ve got a team capable of managing pure OSS projects, your cost and agility advantages increase significantly. But if those skills are missing or stretched thin, proprietary forks or commercial distributions can bridge that gap, at a price.
What matters at the C-level is ownership. Whether you’re using pure open-source or a commercial variant, what you can’t afford is unresolved dependency. Make sure responsibility for uptime, patching, and incident response is assigned and reliable. OSS is powerful, but only if the structure around it is solid.
Ubuntu and traditional infrastructure tools continue to dominate the Linux and software platforms landscape
Even as technology moves fast, certain open-source tools continue to be favored by a majority of enterprises. Ubuntu remains the top Linux distribution for the third year running, used by 56.73% of organizations. Debian follows at 31.73%, and CentOS, despite its end-of-life status, is still used by 25.96%.
When it comes to web and infrastructure software, long-standing open-source tools still dominate. NGINX is used by 50.25% of companies surveyed, and Apache HTTP Server by 48.74%. Most of them, 71%, use both. Apache Tomcat, at 38.19% adoption, also remains widely deployed.
The pattern is clear: familiarity and proven reliability still play a key role in technology decisions. These tools are stable, well-documented, and understood by a broad pool of developers and administrators. That makes them easy to maintain and integrate.
As you evaluate technology stacks, it’s worth making sure newer tools can integrate easily with these dominant OSS components. Compatibility, transparency, and maturity go a long way in supporting uptime, performance, and reduced operational friction. Choosing widely supported OSS tools also makes hiring and training easier, another reason usage remains high across sectors.
Strategic contribution and internal processes are essential to unlocking OSS value
Using open-source software is just one part of the equation. To actually benefit at scale, companies need to contribute to the projects they rely on and build internal processes that sustain that effort. Simply downloading packages is only a temporary tactic. Real value comes when your organization is engaged in the health and direction of the open-source tools within your stack.
Gaël Blondelle, Chief Membership Officer at the Eclipse Foundation, made this point clearly: “To unlock its full potential, organizations need to invest in their people, establish the right processes, and actively contribute to the long-term sustainability and growth of the technologies they depend on.” He’s right. Dependency without participation creates risk. If your engineers aren’t part of the community, they don’t influence the direction of the code. If your business doesn’t have internal workflows for OSS patching, testing, or compliance, adoption becomes technical debt.
C-suite leaders need to think long term. OSS is a living ecosystem. If your company benefits from it, you need to keep it healthy. That means funding contributions, encouraging engineering teams to engage openly with maintainers, and setting policies around upstream participation. These actions improve code stability, reduce integration delays, and give you visibility over future roadmaps.
Open-source adoption supports innovation, but success depends on operational discipline
Enterprise OSS use keeps climbing for clear reasons. Perforce’s 2025 report shows near-universal adoption across companies of every size, industry, and region. Innovation, reduced cost, flexibility, those are hard to ignore. OSS continues to be at the core of progress in major fields like data analytics, AI, automation, and cloud infrastructure.
But adoption only works when it’s matched with operational discipline. Running production on OSS without structured patch management, security reviews, or skilled support puts major systems at risk. Relying on end-of-life software, or skipping contribution and governance, undermines the benefits OSS is supposed to deliver.
Leadership matters here. Open-source is an architecture decision. One that requires strategic attention to training, maintenance, compliance, and talent. Companies that treat OSS as foundational infrastructure are the ones positioned to move faster, reduce friction, and build smarter systems.
The organizations seeing the most value from open source are the ones making it a core part of their operating model. They’re integrating across teams, aligning open-source policy with business strategy, and building internal functions capable of owning the software they use. For other companies, it’s time to follow suit.
Recap
Open source is becoming fundamental infrastructure for how modern enterprises build, scale, and compete. The adoption numbers are high, and for good reason. When done right, OSS gives you flexibility, faster iteration, lower vendor dependency, and meaningful cost reduction.
But none of that happens on autopilot. Without the right people, processes, and support systems in place, open source becomes a liability instead of an advantage. Security gaps, stalled migrations, failed audits—that’s what happens when leadership treats OSS as a shortcut instead of a strategic asset.
The takeaway here is direct: if your business runs on open source, it needs oversight, investment, and contribution. That means funding internal skills development, participating in the communities you rely on, and setting governance that can scale with your tech.
