UK lags behind in open source adoption

open source

The UK is lagging behind the rest of Europe when it comes to open source adoption for small and medium-sized businesses.

That's the finding of research conducted by TNS Gallup on behalf of TNS Gallup, on behalf of Sun Microsystems' MySQL division.

It found that adoption of open source in the UK is only at 34 per cent, considerably behind the 72 per cent of France or 68 per cent of Germany. The only country surveyed that came in with less was Sweden with 33 per cent.

There were also negative findings for the future of open source as 48 per cent of companies in the UK didn't expect to use open source in the next two years.

At a recent discussion about the use of open source within government, Laurent Lachal, Ovum's open source research director, claimed the UK was also behind the rest of Europe in adoption within the public sector but needed to get on board with it before it gets left too far behind.

Read our comment piece about jumping on the open source train here.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.