The biggest obstacle in the path of open source development doesn't appear to be Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) - it's proprietary software and the lack of standards. This, according a survey released Wednesday by Santa Clara-based Evans Data Corp.

The survey published in its latest Enterprise Development Management Issues report says 25 percent of development managers at companies with more than 2000 employees, complained about the lack of standards as a stumbling block to developing open standards software.

The number has dropped in the last 6 months when more than 33 percent of development managers cited the same problem.

The majority of IT managers, 26.7 percent, say that their company's proprietary software is the biggest problem they faced with regard to open source software development. Another 10 percent blamed the possibility of forking in the code. Only 9.3 percent of developers said open source was not reliable enough, and 7.6 percent said that it lacks the adequate testing criteria.

Open source programs such as Linux and FreeBSD have source code that is available free of charge to the general public. The thinking behind this is that a large pool of programmers not concerned with owning the product or making bucketfuls of money on it will make a more useful and bug-free product for everyone to use. The debate over open source sometimes pits companies like Microsoft against open source gurus like Linux inventor Linus Torvalds.

The Enterprise Development Management Issues is a bi-annual survey series offering comprehensive information on platforms and operating system migrations, web services, OSS and Linux, language usage, Internet development, technology adoption and development tools.

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