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56.2% of Software Developers use Open Source
cfelde writes " 56.2% of software developers use open source components by ZDNet's ZDNet -- Evans Data has found a rising trend toward including open source modules in software development world. While 38.1% said they used OSS modules in their applications in Spring of 2001, in the most recent survey, 56.2% said they had."
...but the more interesting question is of that body of users, how many follow the terms of the GPL or whatever free license the Library is distributed with?
I would have thought it to be a lot more... There are so many useful tools that it is hard *not* to come across the tools as a developer.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
I would like to see a breakdown of open source software across operating systems. I would bet that out of that 56.2% a large majority of the development still occurs on Windows. It would be interesting to see.
It's a bit low if you take in mind that nearly every developer has a copy of Firefox or some other tool.
It would be interesting to know what license is most common. I have a gut feeling that BSDL/LGPL are a lot more popular among "traditional", closed-source software makers...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
anyone who uses SDL/OpenGL/OpenAL/Java must use open source components. Same goes for .net, that is, after all, open.
I know there are stupid licencing laws with .net and jaav btw, so dont troll off about that.
Why UNIX?
Can someone suggest to me why small funded Internet startups not use Open Source to produce programs to minimize cost?
Science without religion is lame.
Is that for Unix/Linux stuff or does it include windows and macs? And are macs unix? or just uniques?
We just implemented some new business process systems at my work. Management + Vendors == My life a living hell.
Anyway, now that it's all setup, I've been cruising around and they offer the names, licences and follow the terms of every application they use, including:
MIT License
Apache License
GPL
and
Lesser GPL
I wonder what percentage of software developers that are on the clock are using OSS. I bet most of these developers are doing this stuff in their free time for zero pay.
evil adrian
If you want to convince closed-source software developers to consider writing open source software -- or, for that matter, if you simply want to make closed-source software developers aware of open source software -- then what better approach is there than saying "here's some code; go ahead and use it" and waiting until they notice that the code is both useful and high quality?
People don't just become open source software developers overnight; there's a gradual process involved, and it almost always includes a stage of starting to recognize the virtues of open source software while still writing closed-source software -- a stage which the GPL makes extremely difficult.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
John Koenig, principal of Riseforth, a consulting service for software vendors, said many software developers and end users are attracted to a different kind of free. "They have the ability to do what they want with it: Put it anywhere you want, change it if you want -- and sell it if you want, in a lot of cases," he said.
Like, whoa!
No.. it can't be.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
The CherryOS guys were nice enough to include an opensource component (PearPC.) So are they in this statistic even if they didn't want to admit that they took advantage of this opensource project? How many more smal start-up companies are going to try to repackage opensource projects and sell them?
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It shoud also be noticed that they are simply using open source software instead of making contribution. It is the contribution that counts. Also, I think the are way more then 56.2% of developers who are using proprietary software in development process. There are some overlap between open source users and proprietary software users. But it is still a good number to tell people the impact of open source software in general.
Actually, that was a little trollish..
What I meant was that the vast, vast majority of Freshmeat projects are unmaintained and never go anywhere. People who bought a book on C, Python or Perl and wrote some useless util they never really finished.
I'm pretty sure that >99% of software developers, or anyone who sits down at a desktop PC, are using zlib and libpng. I'm sure there are other libraries that are just as widely used accross Windows and Mac OS X.
How long before this decends into a BDSL vs GPL flamefest?
What he means is that there are alot of beginners that get interested in writing a little program, but they get too ambitious, and the little C tutorial isn't comprehensive enough to help them finish. The solution is to not put it on freshmeat until it is fairly usable. I am not putting mine in freshmeat yet because I am still working on menus with Xlib.
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In a company that will not install the GCC compiler and give us a single system to compile our C code on a licensed compiler, every system has openssh and sudo installed.
I use Open Source software because it is good. valgrind on my C code has found so many potential problems in code. I use Linux and gcc because I cannot afford the $1,000 minimum I was spending on proprietary tools at home just to play with technology for my career development.
I envy the beginning programmers today. They can have a full professional system for the cost of the hardware only. They can work on professional software and really contribute then establish their careers without going through what I had to go through to get my first programmers role, 90% hardwork but 10% miracle.
Statistics
If you're developping for a single company, solving a single issue at hand, the GPL is no problem, because you can ask money for it, you can only not decide what happens to the code after you get paid, it's out of your hands. But neither do you lose the code, because you can go on doing what you want with it, so it's not like a sale and transfer. So as far as most programmers are concerned, working at a company IT dept, it shouldn't matter that much.
The only issue is when you wish to solve broad problems, where you have many customers at once, and you don't want one customer taking your work and becoming your competitor, selling to your work other customers, when the inital agreement/hope during the code generation phase was that you'd get a full return from all of them, and they won't outcompete you by selling/giving each other your work. Would you have done the same work if you only got the return from one of your customers?
However, if the problems is broad enough, you can start justifying standardization even among competitors, with standards such as ASTM, ISO, IEEE, for the sake of efficiency and interoperability. In such schemes everybody gives up something, but the customer base benefits trememdously. Imagine if all memory manufacturers produced their own proprietary formats? How about harddrives? How about screws? There are opposite examples too, how about motherboard sockets or car parts? When is a 1-click shopping 'invention' generic enough to be called a screw?
Software standards such as Apache or Linux, emerge similarly, where if you come across a problem, you are allowed to look under the hood, and go search for a standard fix, but if one doesn't exist, you are allowed to go ahead and fix your own problem. Being allowed is a BIG deal, because not everyone has months/forever-never to wait on someone else, and if they can't do it themselves, they'd rather hire another programmer if the original who "owns" the product is unwilling, or is acting similar to a blackmailer. Once you do this, fix the problem for yourself, the cost of releasing the fix is nil. You can only talk about opportunity cost, the sales that you lost that you could have had - which is a very vague term. But if the product wasn't "yours" in the first place, you're committing a crime by simply fixing the problem, and instead you're forced to contact your supplier and cross your fingers and hope he will do it for you. This is the key difference between information "goods" and conventional material goods - if you produce a traditional good, if you hand it over, you no longer get to keep it, it's a cost to you. Once information exists, it costs nothing to freely duplicate, the real cost is only the initial generation part, where money can be quite an incentive, or instead of money, trying to fix your own problem.
Imagine if you could duplicate a car-part that broke down on your car by simply beaming over a copy from your neighbour's? By nature, you can do this with information, and this is what DRM-ultracopyright-digital technologies are meant to fix, so you will no longer be able to, because the intellectual property owners want to get paid. Welcome transactional digital age, where every information transfer network packet is handled as a database or bank transaction - it will either transfer and erase original, or not transfer at all. I wonder how they will apply this to your brain, when you try to teach - i.e. transfer information - your kids math, language, literature, culture.
I think information consumption, education in existing knowledge, is at least as important as the creation or generation of new information, because without a good education you only generate crap. Therefore consumption of information such as education, going to a public library, or even listening to music, could be compensated financially, instead of put a break on by lack of funds. Plain english - you should get paid to get an education or for reading a good novel instead of you having to pay for it - it's a worthwhile human a
You might not recall, but M$ has a constant tendency to lure people in with lies and trivial bait (ooh, look, we're misinterpreting open source, so we're open, come use ours) and then after people lock themselves into their crap, they suddenly require new terms, or force you to play by new rules...
When you argue otherwise... they pull that old Darth Vader vs Lando Calrissian on Cloud City line...
coder "That wasn't part of the deal!!"
micro$oft "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further!! Or... (pause) do you think you are being treated unfairly?"
coder (visibly gulps in fear) "No, not at all."
But hey folks, it happened when they were partnered with Novell, and then stabbed those folks in the back, they did it to IBM, they slowed the adoption of Java to the point where the much nastier activeX took over (but Sun keeps kissing their ass)...
Pretty much every company that ties themselves in with Microsoft gets raped out of everything they have tied into that project (Symantec, Network Associates and pretty much every antivirus and antispyware vendor now has their neck on the block, and M$ will swing the axe once they can do so... since antitrust lawsuits, even by the US gov't really don't mean squat (as we have all seen, even LOSING those lawsuits doesn't concern microsoft anymore))
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
They know Apache, they know Tomcat, they know MySQL, but a good portion of these same people don't know that each of these are open source.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I'm thinking PHP probably with MySQL makes up for the largest part of it. Other web developing apps too. And maybe they write some scripts or modules for Apache and that counts as developing or maybe just using Apache to run scripts/programs and consider that as "developing". GCC (like Mingw) might also be used a lot.
Yea, well, you do realize that 88.3247910% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Look, there's no reason to be so fuzzy with the numbers. This survey received exactly 5830 responses, and of those, exactly 3278 developers said that they use OSS. That means that precisely 56.2264150943396226415(0943396226415)... percent of all developers use OSS.
This is a rational number, people; it sure as hell ain't pi. There's no reason to get lazy and muddy the waters with approximations.
Not all that suprising. I meen for example a bunch of C and BISON stuff is open source right? Plus just for development it's logicle you can see what everyone else has done and go from their.
Whether there is some special provision for a lower price licence, say, for companies with up to 2 developers? Or even for an individual developer?
$1500 USD seems a little too much for a small guy doing a Windows Tetris-like (or Jewel-) game...
If you need to dump outlook, get Evolution plus the Evolution Exchange Connector. That will cover having to connect to Microsoft's exchange servers.
:)
That app has done the job for me admirably on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora Core 1, 3 and 4. Email, contacts and calendar. (I use webcals so those got shared to my other project contributors, took a minor bit of tweaking. (didn't cost me 1500-3000 like Microsoft Small Business Server software would've.)
Also, Evolution has Open Office 1 and 2 plugins, and if you don't like evolution, give php groupware a shot. I haven't spent much time on it, so I would welcome reviews
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
"valgrind on my C code has found so many potential problems in code."
Windows Programmer.
Sounds like just another unscientific survey reported on Slashdot.
They can have a job... oops! Are we talking about the Indian sub-continent or North America and Europe here?
Cygwin is not a toy. I develop on it all day. My productivity in Cygwin is much higher than my productivity in raw Windows.
If I'm reading this right, they are simply using open source software, and not necessarily (as the Slashdot summary says) "[using] OSS modules in their applications". Was I the only one who immediately read that as if they were linking (L)GPL'd modules into their code or something similar?
It's not really clear what the statistic includes anyway. The only specific cases mentioned in TFA are "the operating system" and "application servers like Jboss or Gluecode". I certainly wouldn't describe using a Linux box somewhere in my organisation as "using an OSS module in my application", and I doubt more than half the software developers in the world use something like Jboss or Gluecode. Does writing software in an OSS-friendly scripting language count? Using an OSS database in the back-end? Does using Firefox to access a web-app?
Without clarification, the number is as meaningless as most other OSS-vs.-CSS statistics produced by either side.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Stuff from the Apache Java projects have made its way into all sorts of commercial ware - even the Java Runtime itself.
You misread the grandparent article. Its author is talking about using Cygwin, not incorporating Cygwin code into applications. Using Cygwin is free.
Car parts are actually a good analogy to FOSS. Lots of car parts are interchangeable. I have even used some Toyota car parts on Honda motorcycle engine...
Oh well, what the hell...
Software standards such as Apache or Linux
Linux is not a "standard." POSIX is a standard, which Unixes (Linux too) follow.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
You really want a better way? Just point out all of the competitors who are eating their lunch with GPL'd software.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
That at least some of the utilities they're using are open source. Heck, even Microsoft uses Perl and GNU m4 in build process. Many devs use Emacs and UNIX CLI tools.
The only thing new here is that public domain and home grown licenses are being replaced with more formal open source licenses. A long standing method of operation, using free publicly available source code, now has a new label, "Open Source". Companies have been using public domain source, libraries, and tools for decades. The C Users Journal mainted a library. Technical books came with source code samples. People posted their work to BBS, Bix, the CompuServer DDJ Forum. Some people post buggy code and asked for help and often received it.
Every generations thinks they discovered something new and they are usually wrong. Your daddy legally shared source code too. Your grandma didn't only do it in the missionary position.
I maintain a Microsoft SQL and Exchange server (not my choice, but management is stubborn about migrating), but I use Firefox and Jext, an open source text editor, to do my work.
If I were polled, what would I say? My employer doesn't allow code to be released open-source, but yet I use Open Source code to do my job.
Linux is a de-facto standard. Solaris and *cough* SCO Unix have support for running Linux binaries for example.
it isn't "linux" binairy. it's a ELF or a.out binairy... yet another standard.
i'll bet you noticed too, lot of games are using Python for customizing/scripting game scenarios etc.
This cant be bad, i guess.. Proves me again, its a useful and flexible language
I interpret that as excluding platforms and tools such as CVS, Linux, Perl, and Emacs.
Clearly the survey as about using Boost, Log4J (does that date me as a Java developer?), embedded Perl and Python, and other OSS entities as software modules.
Linux fanboys are getting to be really uneducated nowadays. One of these days, they'll say that Linux has nothing to do with Unix.
Allow me to educate the fanboy a little with documentation from the FreeBSD project: Why use (what are) a.out and ELF executable formats?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I'd like to know exactly what their sample size and expected percent error. I am not arguing that the number could be 56%, but saying 56.2% is like saying, .3% really has no meaning.
There's a 75.3% chance of rain, +/- 5%
The
To sum it up, the link says that gcc dropped support for a.out format, and some ISO-C++ features require ELF format, and so FreeBSD had to switch. It also says that Linux switched earlier because of problems in implementing shared libraries in Linux with a.out format, and that it was a painfull transition.
Please explain how this conflicts with the parents claim that "it isn't "linux" binairy. it's a ELF or a.out binairy... yet another standard" ? And please explain what the "Linux fanboy" was supposed to learn from this ?
Did you actually read the link you provided ? You seem to imply that ELF and a.out are Linux-specific executable formats (by attacking the parent claiming that they are standards and not Linux-specific), but the link claims that a.out was in use in FreeBSD and ELF is used right now, so your link directly contradicts your post.
Are you trolling or do you just need more coffee ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Please explain how this conflicts with the parents claim that "it isn't "linux" binairy. it's a ELF or a.out binairy... yet another standard" ? And please explain what the "Linux fanboy" was supposed to learn from this ?
It doesn't conflict. You need more coffee.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I'm a sysadmin and love using OSS stuff. I don't have to go through the maze of approval, budget, purchasing and installing licenses. I don't have to worry about tracking the license for users, to transfer to another machine or deal with a downed license server.
.cshrc does and source it over & over until they run out of memory and crash their xterm. Some have code that hard codes IP addresses instead of using a *variable* to allow use on another subnet.
Even if you discard all those barriers, I find OSS to be a bit easier to support. Not always, but more often.
Anyways, that's using OSS tools. Code is another issue and I imagine there can be a whole 'nother mess of red tape there and lots of reasons to avoid it as a developer.
OTOH, I wonder how many developers are even aware that they're using OSS code. I know developers that haven't checked in clearcase views for 3 years. Some have issues with figuring out what their
Well if you say so, sonny, that must be correct. But .... but, well, how do you know ? I'm for the idea that everybody should be able to do his own thing, I'm just curious, that's all. Why don't you tell us where all this knowlege comes from. Personally, I can think of only one way that you could possible know - but I'm probably wrong, eh ?
How many beans make five, anyhow ?