A prime choice from yesterday's panels at the Red Hat Summit in Boston was a synopsis of Alfresco's third Open Source Barometer. The Barometer is a yearly survey conducted by open source content-management outfit Alfresco to learn about who's using what and why amongst folks doing content management. For every revelation that had me nodding in recognition, there was another that came as a total surprise.

As speaker Ian Howells explained, the first big surprise was how important Windows was in the open source picture -- something that will no doubt hearten everyone over there who's been talking about making Windows a great place for OSS to play. According to the survey, most of those polled prefer to download and try open source packages on a standalone PC or notebook running Windows; if they like what they see, then they go do the actual deployment on a Linux machine (one typically running RHEL or Fedora -- little surprise there!).

Another surprise was how differences in geography can change adoption statistics. Easy example: While Microsoft Office was used by a surprisingly large number of the folks polled for generating content, adoption and use of OpenOffice.org was twice as high in Europe (especially France and Germany). Incidentally, the U.S. was the single largest open source adopter; the U.K. lagged behind the rest of Europe and even India here.

Some revelations were fairly typical: MySQL, VMware, JBoss / Tomcat, and RHEL were all kings of their respective hills. In fact, as a general rule, each category tended to have a single dominant open source player, with all the other runners-up in said category taking marginal slices of the pie. Case in point: MySQL gobbled about 60% of the database pie, with SQL Server and Oracle snacking on most of the rest. Ingres didn't even have a statistically significant slice.

The biggest surprise was how large a threat Microsoft SharePoint Server represented to open source content management. The reason for this: adopt SharePoint and you have point-for-point substitutes for many common open source stack items -- SQL Server for MySQL, MS Office for OO.o, and so on. I opined that Exchange and AD were the other big lock-in products for Microsoft (apart from Windows itself), and he agreed, but pointed out that the SharePoint threat was all the greater because it was so underrated and often unnoticed.

Then there were some things that didn't come as much of a surprise, but were fascinating to hear about anyway. Right after Novell's partnership with Microsoft, adoption of RHEL vs. SUSE (which had previously been running neck and neck) started to diverge widely -- with RHEL taking a much larger lead with each successive month. Evidently, contaminated open source isn't open source. Ian's deathless expression for this sort of thing was "In open source, you can't be half-pregnant." I had to use that as a headline.