Executive summary Last year, we produced the inaugural State of Open Source known by most engineers—and even encouraging more in Financial Services research report, which set a baseline for contribution, particularly where there is an OSPO, or similar, the understanding of open source aspirations, consumption, in place. Over half (54%) of respondents shared that contrib- contribution, and leadership in the industry. Now, in our uting to open source improved the quality of the software second year, we report on those same elements with addi- they were currently using and identified improved quality, a tional insight into the changes during the last year. Further, better workplace, stronger security, and fulfilling moral obli- we highlight obstacles and challenges that individual orga- gations as the top reasons that their organizations should nizations, burgeoning communities, and the industry itself contribute to open source. Active participation in open face. Here is a distillation of the key findings. source is also cited as a key factor in recruiting and retaining IT talent. The industry is making more commits While it is challenging to capture an accurate snapshot of the Consumption is getting a lot of attention industry’s actual code contributions, for reasons discussed in The survey results show an overall positive sentiment the report, a like-for-like comparison between contributions toward open source, with 56% of respondents reporting in 2021 and 2022 from financial services shows significant that the value their organization derives from open source growth. This year, we found 41,277 repositories with financial consumption has increased in the last year. A total of 48% services committers, which is an increase of 43% compared of respondents also work in organizations that openly to last year's results. Commits also increased, albeit at a encourage open source consumption, which is a signif- slightly lower level. The repositories were quite diverse in icant improvement (+21%) on last year. This positive trend, nature, including test frameworks, developer tooling, user however, is not without challenges. Security is a clear and interface toolkits and infrastructure code. Just over half of ever-present concern, as is decision-making regarding the code within the financial services dataset we evaluated is which components to use, when to update, how to manage written in Java, compared to 11% in the entire GitHub corpus. license obligations, and more. It’s also clear that open source Financial services firms have been dedicated users of Java consumption policy needs to be better coupled with tooling, for decades, with the language long being considered the education, guidelines, and more to increase its effectiveness. de facto for “enterprise” development. Survey respondents ranked the need for investment in operational issues, such as legal, compliance, security, and Signs point to a greater appreciation tooling, higher than the need to focus on the overall “value of the value of open source proposition” and “leadership.” Data in the report indicates that financial services leaders (both business and technology) are now more fully grasping the benefits of consuming open source—something long THE 2022 STATE OF OPEN SOURCE IN FINANCIAL SERVICES 5
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