UK firms are lagging behind in the adoption of open source software, suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Alfresco Software, an open source enterprise content management firm, made the claim in its barometer survey conducted between April and June 2007 using opt-in data provided by 10,000 of the 15,000 Alfresco community members.

The survey asked users about their preferences in operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers and portals to capture the latest information in how companies evaluate and deploy open source and legacy proprietary software stacks in the enterprise.

The survey found that the US is leading open source adoption globally, which Howells believes is being driven by a search for innovation and better value for technology investments.

In Europe, on the other hand, open source adoption is often driven by governments seeking better value for their citizens.

Windows is increasingly popular as an evaluation platform for open source software, but most enterprises use Linux when they go into production, according to new research.

"The survey shows a clear leader at each level of the open source stack but also indicates an increasing trend for organisations to adopt a mixed stack, combining open source and proprietary software, to enable use of best of breed components," said Ian Howells, chief marketing officer at Alfresco.

"The survey also illustrated that organisations require the flexibility to make component changes within the stack between the evaluation and deployment phases."

According to the survey, deployments of Red Hat have grown twice as fast as Novell SuSE since the controversial November 2006 patents and interoperability agreement between Novell and Microsoft.

"This finding suggests that customers may not like the terms of the deal as more information became public," said Howells.