InfoWorld — Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 percent to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills.

Written by consultant and author Bernard Golden in conjunction with O'Reilly Media, the 50-page report attempts to document the spread of open source in the enterprise. Although the study did not quantify the actual percentage of open source products used in the enterprise, the strong growth in available jobs—in a period when overall IT job growth may be slowing—points to a surprising breadth of adoption. Indeed, the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software.

Whatever, the reason, the study's results gainsay at least some of IT's conventional wisdom. "You still have people in large IT shops saying open source doesn't have much of a presence, so the employment numbers are surprising," Golden says.

Another important indicator of the open source growth spurt can be seen on SourceForge, which maintains a database of projects and downloads. The number of projects hosted by the site has grown from 12,500 in 2000 to nearly 200,000 at the end of 2007, an annual growth rate of about 55 percent, according to the report.

Annual downloads on SourceForge have skyrocketed as well. In 2003, there were somewhat less than 200,000; by the end of last year the annual total approached 800 million. By the end of 2009, if not sooner, the annual total will likely reach 1 billion, Golden says. As large as that number is, it may be understating the actual number of downloads, because some products are hosted on mirror sites that do not track cumulative totals.

Where open source skills are hottest

The researchers found that the number of open source-related job postings by large businesses is approximately 1 in 52, or about 1.9 percent. It's worth emphasizing that the percentage refers to all enterprise jobs, not just IT positions.

They gathered this figure by analyzing an O'Reilly Research database of U.S. online job postings dating back to mid-2005. "For this report, we focused primarily on jobs postings from Web sites of about half of all the Fortune 1000 companies. We counted the number of job postings that mention specific open source-related technical terms and tracked trends over time," the report states.

Not surprisingly, technology companies are doing much of the hiring. About 1 in 55 of the jobs posted by tech-related companies asks for open source skills, compared to just 1 in 385 in the rest of the Fortune 1000 job market.

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