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Open Source Growing At an Exponential Rate
sipmeister writes "Two computer scientists who work for enterprise software giant SAP have shown that open source is growing at an exponential rate. Not only is the code base growing exponentially, but also the number of viable projects. Researchers Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle analyzed the database of open source startup ohloh.net and looked at the last 16 years of growth in open source. They consistently got the best fit for the data using an exponential model. Relating this to open source market revenue, Desphande and Riehle conclude that open source is eating into closed source at a non-trivial pace."
The # of people who have seen goatse has gone up 1000s of times in the last year.
CNN actually had a piece on this recently.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Suppose I write some videogame that I would like to sell for a few bucks because I'm a starving student. Hypothetically this videogame is really cool and I had a great idea.
I might need some numerical routines to handle sparse matrices and do a few other things that have been well developed for years now. All the libraries are under the GPL though, so now to have any chance of selling my videogame for $5 I have to redevelop all of this linear algebra software from scratch.
Maybe linear algebra routines actually are BSD, but that's not the point (I don't have a videogame either). There's no way for me to charge $5 for this great videogame idea unless I rewrite a whole bunch of code that hasn't been touched in ten years. What if the GPL code did something as mundane as write an xml file. Does it make sense to force every project using this to open their source to use this? It's not like we're repackaging someone's webserver--we're just writing a file.
It doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel so it's not reasonable to re-implement this stuff...it might take weeks. So I have no chance of _selling_ my game. I would be motivated to polish up the interface if I thought I could make a couple hundred dollars though.