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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?
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.
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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!
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
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.