2025 report reveals trends in open source software use

The 2025 State of Open Source Report by Perforce examines the current trends and challenges in the realm of open source software, based on responses from 433 professionals globally.

The report highlights that open source continues to experience growth, with 96% of surveyed professionals having invested in open source technology in the past year. A significant portion of this group, 26%, noted a considerable increase in their use. Cost savings, particularly from the absence of licensing fees and overall cost reductions, were the primary drivers, increasing from 37% last year to 53.33% this year. 

Cloud and container technologies emerged as the predominant areas of investment at 39.52%. They are followed by database and data technologies (33.33%), and programming languages and runtimes (32.86%), indicating an uptick in both development and consumption of open source software.

The use of end of life (EOL) software remains prevalent, with 41% of respondents utilizing Centos or AngularJS EOL software. Among large organisations, this figure rises to 40%, with 25% undecided yet about migration. EOL software users displayed increased risks, with 41% of them failing compliance audits, compared to the 14% failure rate across all respondents.

A reported 28% of the respondents lack a response plan for newly disclosed CentOs vulnerabilities. This figure is even higher at 38% for large enterprises, where only a quarter have secured long-term support vendors.

Security, compliance, and maintenance challenges are significant barriers to the adoption of open source software. Concerns include keeping up with updates and patches (63.81%), meeting security standards (60%), and the maintenance of EOL versions (58.57%). Many also reported issues with installation, configuration, and upgrades (57.14%).

The lack of personnel, skills, and technical support are critical challenges that hinder open source adoption. Over half of the professionals reported these as constraints, with insufficient professional support being the foremost reason preventing transitions from proprietary to open source software.

Open source compliance is a priority for 84% of respondents, with GDPR being the most common regulatory requirement at 46.82%, followed by ISO27001 at 26.01%, and various internal policies.

The report also shed light on big data challenges, with 47% of responders lacking confidence in managing their big data stacks due to issues like data integration (58.73%) and data quality (41.27%). Regular maintenance, monitoring, and external support were principal methods to address these challenges, with modernization and advanced analytics being top 2025 priorities.

Addressing the skills shortage in open source, 49.52% of organisations are investing in training, 30.95% hire external experts, and 25.24% partner with external vendors. Moreover, over half of the organizations perform security scans on open source packages, with 37.20% contributing to open source projects.

The survey's geographic distribution included 31.64% of respondents from the EU and 28.18% from North America. Almost 40% of participants are from companies with over 500 employees, and a notable 20.79% are from firms with more than 5000 employees.