Interestingly, the survey results indicate that OSS in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations.

OSS as a replacement for commercially available products

Of the large number of application software projects, respondents indicated a higher rate of using OSS as a replacement for commercially available products while using mostly OSS components for their infrastructure development, said the research company.

In areas where OSS projects are most mature, IT departments appear comfortable with using OSS components to enhance existing infrastructure environments, the Gartner survey indicated. However, in the less mature areas of application software, OSS is more readily used as a replacement for commercially available software, probably because of the cost and sophistication level required to customise many application products.

Top three reasons for using OSS