Black Duck Software recently released the results of their annual Future of Open Source survey. On the surface, it looks pretty good. As the title of this post says, 78% of companies “run on open source”. Open source usage has doubled in business IT environments since 2010. Two-thirds consider open source offerings before their proprietary counterparts.

Not only are companies using open source software, they’re contributing, too. Some 64% of companies participate, with nearly 90% expecting to increase their contributions in the next few years. Half of the companies say more than 50% of their engineers are working on open source. Many companies see open source participation as a recruiting tool as well.

But when you dig a little deeper, there are some issues, too. A majority of companies view open source software as having higher quality and security, but most don’t monitor the code for vulnerabilities. Companies lack formalized policies both for consumption and contribution. A lot of the terms are pretty vague, too. “Participation” in open source can take on a variety of meanings, some of which are basically token involvement for PR purposes.

What I found most interesting, though, was the projects listed as “most valuable”: OpenStack and Docker. I may be biased by my day job, but I see that as a sign of the rise of *aaS. Despite the growth that cloud services have already seen, there’s a lot more market out there to be tapped.

Another interesting item was the increase in venture capital investment, both in gross and per-deal measures. Hopefully, this reduces the issues faced by projects such as OpenSSL and PGP, where a lack of funding puts much of the Internet’s secure communication at risk.

Finally, my initial reaction to the headline was “the other 22% do and don’t know it.” As it turns out, I wasn’t that far off. Black Duck reported that 3% of respondents do not use open source software at all. (Where’s the remaining 19%?) I actually wonder if that’s true. It seems like you’d have to try pretty hard to avoid any of it. This will become increasingly true as time goes on, when even historically hostile companies like Microsoft being open sourcing some of their products.