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Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year
CBR is reporting that open source use in the workplace is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. Up 26% since last year, businesses are using 94 different open source tools to get the job done. "[OpenLogic's] breakdown of licenses for the top 25 packages found that Apache, not the GPL, is the most common license. 62% of the packages use Apache, 27% use some variant of GPL and 4% each use BSD, CPL, Eclipse, MPL and Perl licenses (since packages may be released under two or more licenses, percentages total to more than 100%).
From the article:
"Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006..."
I read somewhere that something like 90% of large companies use free and open source software somewhere in their business.
This probably isn't on their desktop machines of course. It is more likely to be things like web. dns and email servers, and network routers.
Apache license != Apache web server
Surely not. Apache can do a lot more than merely serve PHP apps.
Obviously, it can serve any static files all on its own, and it can serve any other type of CGI as well (C, shell, Perl, Python, Ruby, the list goes on). Apache Tomcat is a enterprise-level Java server, and I suspect this is where a large amount of the corporate usage falls under. Apache can also be used as a WebDAV server, it can be used as a Subversion server too.
PHP is a hobbyist thing, not a corporate thing.
Random and weird software I've written.
Just because you use Apache HTTP server doesn't mean you are running PHP. Apache can be used to serve all kinds of dynamic content. For example:
Apache -> Tomcat (Java)
Apache -> Mongrel (ruby on rails)
Apache -> CGI (whatever)
I would guess that Apache/Tomcat/Jboss installs are more common than PHP in commercial enterprises.
As others have mentioned there are tons of projects using the Apache license. Spamassassin is a good example.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
It also happens to be 25%, not 26%. But, yeah, that's an absurd statistic.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Not only is the summary is extremely misleading, it links to an equally misleading blog post with no direct link to TFA, which I found here
Caveat Utilitor
According to TFA it's the number of free software packages that's "up 26%", not business use of free software.
Bad submitter, bad!!!.
Bad editors, bad! Bad!
Caveat Utilitor
"It's easy to get really messy [insert language here] code when you start building something big/complex."
There. Fixed that for ya. :-)
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