via CIO.com - Open Source by Esther Schindler on 5/29/08

May 30, 2008—CIO— Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget").

That's no longer the case, according to a survey of IT and business
executives and managers, conducted in late April 2008 by CIO.com. The
survey, collecting data from 328 respondents, showed that more than
half the respondents (53 percent) are using open-source applications in
their organization today, and an additional 10 percent plan to do so in
the next year. For nearly half, 44 percent, open-source applications
are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the
acquisition process.

Among those currently employing open-source solutions, the primary
uses are operating systems such as Linux (78 percent), infrastructure
applications, such as back-end databases and Web servers (74 percent),
and software development tools like Eclipse (61 percent)...

Read the entire article here.