Why open source is important? Why businesses need to embrace open source? Let the survey findings do the talking: To recap – open source is safer, cheaper and better in code quality.

The cloud and mobile technology help encouraging open source innovations. As more organizations are shifting toward open source, the importance of open source also increases accordingly. But why open source is attractive?

The hot issue today is lock-ins: Migrating your data to other IT service providers is difficult, if not impossible. Unless the service providers are developed upon the same platform, lock-ins’ impact is always prominent. In 2012, lock-ins are on top of business IT decision makers’ mind: Their open source adoption is driven by lock-in issues, followed by the potential costs saving.

Acknowledging those issues, businesses are now focusing on open source platform for app development, such as OpenStack. Just check out the trends: In just 84 weeks, 206 companies joined OpenStack. To compare, Linux takes 880 weeks to attract 203 companies.

This cloud computing infographic is courtesy of Rackspace Cloud – now built on OpenStack platform to eliminate cloud lock-in issues (click for a larger version):

Via Rackspace Blog