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State of Open: The UK in 2021, Phase Two

Released on 7 July 2021

The first large-scale survey of open source adoption across UK business and industry, undertaken in Q2 2021, with survey outputs and case studies. Sponsored by GitHub.

Report Includes:

  • The State of Open Survey 2021: adoption, contribution, policies and skills across UK organisations
  • Case studies from UK business and industry
  • Survey interview of Dr Jennifer Barth by OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock

Download the report

Executive Summary

Adoption is near-universal

  • 97% of UK organisations use open source technologies; 89% run open source software internally
  • 65% of respondents contribute to open source projects — including 53% of non-tech organisations

Why organisations adopt

  • Top reasons: saving on costs (75%), more collaboration (72%), skills development (64%), quality of code (61%) and security (52%)
  • 77% of the UK public sector looks to open source for skills development

Maturity is growing

  • Just over half (54%) of organisations have written policies and processes for open source contributions

 

Survey interview of Dr Jennifer Barth by OpenUK CEO, Amanda Brock

 

Case Studies

OpenUK Annual Survey

Contribute to our Research by sparing 30 minutes to complete our survey in partnership with our Economists in Residence, The PSC – wherever in the world you are, whether you are working or not and whatever sector you might work in.

Survey

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