New research has indicated that most of today's applications are built using open source software (OSS), once again proving its importance.
According to GitHub's Octoverse 2022 report (opens in a new tab) on the State of Open Source Software, 90% of Fortune 100 companies use OSS to some extent, compared to findings in the company's first report in 2012, where companies were only using OSS to run their web servers.
This year alone, there were 413 million OSS contributions to GitHub from the platform's 94 million users, the company noted.
Free software in 2022
The report adds that commercially supported OSS projects are on the rise, indicating that about a third of Fortune 100 companies now have an open source program office (OSPO) to coordinate their OSS strategies.
Commercially backed projects have proven particularly popular with new contributors, accounting for about half of their work.
It's not all good news, though, as the Synopsis Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report (opens in a new tab) for 2022 found that despite a steady 3% decline in vulnerabilities year over year, the other, more than 80% of the analyzed code bases were always found with at least one vulnerability.
The results showed a more promising drop in high-risk vulnerabilities, showing an 11% drop.
This could be due in part to lack of maintenance, as 88% of the code bases studied show no signs of being updated in the last 24 months.
According to GitHub's VP of Developer Relations Martin Woodward, who says that OSS powers 99% of the world's software, "Open source has a number of benefits, ranging from providing an environment that allows you to work quickly and flexible, with the possibility of collaboration of developers from all over the world.
Via VentureBeat (Opens in a new tab)