The glass is less than half full, and that is worrying. One of the focus areas in the 2022 State of Data Science report was enterprise adoption of open source. On every important metric, less than half the respondents gave the answer I was hoping for. For example, “We use a managed repository” got 43%, and “We use a vulnerability scanner” got 36%.
With such a low security maturity, it is obvious that the Log4j debacle and recent hacktivism has dented open source adoption. 40% report scaling back the use of open source in the past year.
Open Source gives you transparency that proprietary software doesn’t. That means you have the ability to verify that it works as promised instead of simply trusting vendor promises. But if you don’t make use of this transparency and instead simply download something because it’s free, you are setting yourself up for problems. Is your organization found in the more than half-empty part of the glass?