Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Friday 12 December 2008, 11:20 AM
The hidden success of open source (and GPLv3)
The posting is more than just the usual "you don't know how well open source is doing" message from a Red Hat or a Novell. It comes from from Black Duck - a company which makes a very good business with software that checks its clients' software for open open source code. Black Duck does it so its customers can audit that they are obeying all the licence conditions of the software they use - but it gives the company a good insight into actual open source usage.
Here are Black Duck's thoughts:
Myth: Open Source is just source code. Nope, only 15 percent goes out as source, the rest is binaries, scripts, images documentation and the like
Myth: Open Source adoption is mostly application infrastructure. It's not all Linux and MySQL - the open source world is "dominated" by components which get re-used thousands of times (and Black Duck makes its money tracking them).
Myth: There are a only few billion lines of code out there. There are tens of billions of lines, says Black Duck.
Myth: Real programmers do NOT comment. Oh yes they do - about one line for every four lines of source, with Java programmers the most chatty.
Myth: GPL Version 3 is being ignored. Despite the controversy when it was released in June 2007, GPL has grown to over 6,300 projects, surpassing the CPL, Mozilla, MIT and Apache licenses, making it the fifth most popular open source licence.
There's lots more, with diagrams, at Black Duck.
PreviousComments on this post
I'm always wary of claims of success like this by VC funded technology companies. Increasing business by 60%? Okay, but what does that mean specifically?
BD have already shifted their business model once and probably need to "make smoke" to keep their investors off their back.
They are to open source what anti-virus firms are to the Windows-verse - feeding off people's fear. That's bad karma.
Thank you Dogstar! That strikes me as a very interesting analogy, and one I'll certainly run past Black Duck when I next meet them.
In Windows-land we all live happily with anti-virus companies, but are they a good thing, or a necessary evil? Some are certainly better than others. On a purely personal basis, I've always liked AVG and hated Norton, for instance.
Licence monitoring is clearly going to be important in the open source world, but does it enable or restrain users? That would depend on the way the company operates (as well as how un-evil the original licence holders are) and on how good its software is.
And yes, VC-funded companies can say what they like about revenues, and big growth claims in percentage terms can be highly misleading.
Again - a good analogy. We should watch them...
Peter
