[DZone Research] Open Source vs. Proprietary Software

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Open Source: Democratizing Development.

Introduction

As part of 2018 DZone Guide to Open Source, we surveyed 629 software professionals about various aspects of developing and using open source software. In this article, we delve in the stats around how developers from our community feel in regard to open source vs. proprietary software. 

Let's Get Ready to Rumble!

Before diving into how and why the DZone community uses open source software in the rest of this series, let's take a quick look at how open-source and proprietary software stack up in terms of popularity among the developer community. In the research survey for this Guide, we asked respondents four basic questions regarding the open source vs. proprietary debate that dealt with the security, stability, and ease of use of either solution, as well as whether they prefer to look for OSS or proprietary when planning a new project.

The greatest level of parity when comparing proprietary and open source came when we asked developers to tell us which they found more secure. 47% of the 629 respondents claimed they felt that, when it comes to security concerns, open-source and proprietary solutions are "about the same." Interestingly, only 18% of respondents said that they felt proprietary software had definitively better built-in security protocols than open-source software.

When asked to compare the stability of OSS and proprietary solutions, our community again showed a large sense of parity between the two categories. 42% of the 629 respondents told us that they see an equal level of stability between open-source and propriety software. The remaining 58% split more evenly than in the previous question about security. 32% claimed they felt open source is definitively more stable, while 26% expressed the same sentiment for proprietary software. That's where any sense of equality between open-source and propriety solutions ends for our community, however. When asked which type of software is easier to use, 50% of respondents chose open source, while only 20% said they prefer proprietary solutions' ease of use. Given the large, and, often times, helpful communities that exist around the major open-source initiatives, it makes sense that so many developers prefer open source; though, the disparity between the two is a bit surprising.

Finally, when asked whether they prefer proprietary or open source when selecting software for projects, an overwhelming majority (76%) told us that they prefer open source. Taking the above three questions into consideration, the overall popularity of open source should not be a surprise (though the sheer inequality of the responses here, with proprietary only garnering 5% of the vote, is shocking). Here, we see that fact that most respondents told us that, in terms of security and stability, the two solutions were equal, and open source is easier to use, culminating in OSS's extreme popularity among our community.

Conclusion

So, now that we've established the popularity of open source as compared to proprietary software, in the next article in this series we'll examine in more depth why the DZone community uses OSS in their projects, both at home and at work. 

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Open Source: Democratizing Development.