For the fourth year in a row, Tidelift is launching a survey to improve our understanding of how organizations use open source software to build enterprise applications. Open source has become the de-facto modern application development platform, yet increased adoption seems to have brought a new set of challenges and obstacles.

In this annual survey, we hope to improve our understanding of the current challenges organizations face when using open source and the potential solutions to those challenges.

Previous surveys have helped us learn things such as:

• Around 76% of survey respondents cited the perceived risk of how well a package is and will be maintained as the biggest obstacle to increasing open source adoption.
• Confidence in open source practices declines as the size of a company grows—39% of companies with 10,000 or more employees are not confident that the open source components their organization is using are up to date, secure, and well maintained.
• Furthermore, large companies are also dramatically more likely to face challenges using open source because of confusion about internal policies about identifying components that are approved for use.

We want to use our latest survey to determine if these still hold true and also hope to learn more and share our findings in areas such as:

• the challenges organizations and development teams face when using open source for building applications and how they are addressing them
• the impact of the recent wave of cybersecurity attacks, like the ones affecting Colonial Pipeline and SolarWinds, on organizational strategy, and whether it is impacting the way open source usage is managed
• how organizations might be preparing to address recent government and industry regulation to improve the health and safety of the software supply chain

To thank you for taking the time in filling out the survey, we’d like to offer you one of our most popular swag items, our 2021 edition Pay the Maintainers t-shirt. If you are one of the first 500 respondents to complete the survey, we’ll send you a code you can use to get the t-shirt free (we even cover the shipping!). Sadly, we can only ship to North American and European addresses.

Thanks in advance for providing your feedback!