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."

Comments

I for one

[setagllib]

I for one welcome our new open source overlords :)

Re:I for one

[cptnapalm]

Oh, thank you! My, what a friendly bunch of abject servants you all are. I simply must tell all my fellow FOSS overlords all about how sweet you all have been in accepting the yoke placed around your necks by our imperious hands.

Re:I for one

[francium de neobie]

Why waste time welcoming us when you can contribute and become an overlord yourself? ;)

Re:I for one

[tsm_sf]

I think it's hilarious that you took the time to come back and proofread your troll. That's craftsmanship.

Re:I for one

[montyzooooma]

Were your lips moving when you read it?

Re:I for one

[smittyoneeach]

But if everyone is an overlord, who are the serfs?
Or is that the real point?

Re:I for one

[hey!]

And poetically, "Operation Overlord" was the code name for the allied invasion of Normandy, which signaled the beginning of the end of the European war.

Of course, we are much more at what Churchill would have termed the "end of the beginning" stage when it comes to free software, and in that spirit I offer a Churchill quotation that is rather apt:

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a war of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age."

Of course, it's not precisely true that "their deeds will never be recorded", at least if they are using source control as they should.

Viral License?

[phantomcircuit]

So the accusation that the GPL is a viral license wasn't just a bunch of bullshit?

Re:Viral License?

[howlingmadhowie]

i find complaints about the GPL being viral somewhat amusing, seeing as it is invariably closed-source software which is viral and forces everybody else to buy it if they want to interact with it. the GPL however produces free software which everybody can interact with as they wish.

Re:Viral License?

[IBBoard]

Only if your virus is of the "make you freer, healthier and happier" type.

Re:Viral License?

[jrumney]

You can make up hypothetical situations as much as you like, the fact is that if a library is useful, and there has been a GPLed library available for years, then someone somewhere will be selling a commercial library that does the same thing, which you can use in your proprietary project. Even if that were not true, there is no sense in crying about the fact that you can't profit from other people's software without giving something back.

Re:Viral License?

[Bert64]

If this code you want to reuse is GPL, then the author clearly didn't want you packaging up his code into a closed source game and selling it...
You still have the choice of releasing it as GPL and still selling it, most games players won't go to the trouble of downloading and compiling the source themselves.

And how is this worse than proprietary software? I doubt any closed source vendor would allow you to package up their code as part of your product either...

Competition

[AKAImBatman]

Relating this to open source market revenue, Desphande and Riehle conclude that open source is eating into closed source at a non-trivial pace.

Welcome to competition. Open Source tends to cover the areas where software is well established and should be commoditized. As much as we'd all like to keep charging $250 a copy for a library to unzip files, technology marches on. Commercial providers of technology must work harder to win the dollars of their customer. And I for one think the results can only be positive.

What's particularly interesting to note is that web services are the latest craze in software development. The idea is that the value is not so much in the software itself, but in the service provided. This means that both using and supporting Open Source development can help these companies deliver real value to their customers rather than twiddling their thumbs on problems that are long-solved.

Re:Competition

[AKAImBatman]

Sorry, I must have missed that memo. How many major name web services actually make money today?

A lot more than you think, apparently. My last two employers have provided services over the web in the Financial and Health Care industries. They're both rather well-off from that business alone.

A more visible example would be news and blog sites. Quite a few of them make a killing off of advertisements. Their profit models are more difficult to maintain than direct service costs, I'll grant you, but many do well for themselves in spite of the challenges facing them.

On another note, I did just occur to me that I may have caused some confusion by using the term "web services". A lot of people think "SOAP" when they hear that term. While I do know a company or two who charges for access to their SOAP interface (basically, a really fancy remote database interface), I was referring primarily to the delivery of business services over the web. My apologies for any confusion. :-)

And what exponent?

[winmine]

Seriously, don't get the cynical mathematicians on /. going about hyperbole like "exponential rates".

Well, the exponent could be negative, did you think about that? Huh??

The code base is growing

[Soleen]

This is sad that code base of Open Source projects is growing exponentially. Projects become fat ugly and unmanageable. It is also getting harder to debug, port, and even use such programs. http://suckless.org/ has several programs that do their job every well and yet very managable. For example window manager: dwm less than 2K lines of code, is the most feature complete WM I've seen. I've been using it as my main window manager for over year, and was very happy with it. There are few good CLI applications availble that hold approach of been efficient and useful and almost no GUI applications.

What is growing?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” — Bill Gates

The rest of us got over this particular naive metric years ago. The fact that lines of OSS code produced are growing exponentially doesn't tell us anything useful about how much useful stuff can now be done with OSS.

Moreover, the rate of growth now is not the interesting thing. The total volume of serious OSS is still relatively small, and so is its growth in absolute terms. The future potential is far more interesting to explore.

For example, if (as TFA tells us) packaged OSS generated revenues of $1.8B in 2006 and this was around 0.7% of total revenue generated from all packaged software sales, then I disagree with the article's claim that the OSS revenue was not trivial compared to the market as a whole. In business terms, 0.7% market share is nothing. On the other hand, if you also say that the OSS revenue is doubling every year while the total remains roughly constant, and you have evidence that this will continue giving exponential growth, then your data suggests that in a few years the OSS revenue very much will be significant.

However, I'm struggling to find data to support those claims on a first quick look at TFA. The pretty pictures just show that the volume of code is going up, which doesn't tell us anything about the value (economic or practical) of what's being written, nor what the future trends for that value are likely to be.

Re:What is growing?

[AKAImBatman]

- FireFox
- Apache Webserver
- Derby Database
- Sun Java Server Application Server (aka Glassfish)
- PDFBox
- TortoiseCVS
- OpenPortal
- Netbeans
- Rhino
- GWT
- POI
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Solaris
- BCEL
- ANT
- FOP
- Rome (RSS)
- FFMPEG
- VLC
- FileZilla
- GIMP
- DOSBox
- QEMU
- Cygwin
- JHDL
- Bouncy Castle
- jTDS
- PHP
- GCC

The list above is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of Open Source projects that I use and rely upon on a regular basis. It has grown significantly over the years, going from a relatively small list of key programs to permeating nearly every aspect of my day-to-day life and work. If you did a similar inventory of the OSS products you use, I wouldn't be surprised if you came up with a similarly growing list.

So while the article may not answer all your questions, some answers can be found by just looking closer to home. :-)

Re:What is growing?

[pembo13]

Let me pad your list a bit with things of the top of my head

• Subversion
• Linux
• MythTV
• OpenOffice.org
• Thunderbird
• Python
• Gtk
• Qt
• SQLite
• Audacity
• VLC
• GCC
• Eclipse
• KDE
• KDEvelop
• Notepad++
• Samba
• NFS
• OpenSSH
• Pidgin
• Inkscape

And thats just the stuff I use regularly.

Re:What is growing?

[EWIPlayer]

Has anyone thought to ask what closed source is doing? Is it growing exponentially as well? Is it growing faster? Without something to compare it to, saying that OSS is growing exponentially is about as significant as saying it's growing linearly and all the best programmers have long hair.

so is my bank account

[nguy]

My bank account is also growing exponentially, at 1% interest. That doesn't make me rich any time soon.

Exppnential growth is a meaningless property since many things grow exponentially, many of them quite slowly. What matters is the growth rate and any upper limits to growth.

This is terrible news

[eln]

At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Open Source achieves sentience and turns on its creators.

Re:freedom and the GPL

[mr_mischief]

Stop whining already and write your own versions of everything from scratch or using a BSD-alike license. It's not evil for someone who writes software to tell you you can't blatantly rip off their work.

Commercial libraries often are far more "viral". They often have per-copy royalties. They often say you can't reveal the source of any part of your application using the library to a third party, for fear their API will get out and be cloned. People who have licensed commercial libraries and source code to build a project often have a hard time opening the source either BSD or GPL later. In some cases, they even have trouble contributing to a competing open-source project ( see SCO vs. IBM ).

If you want a good virus analogy, how about the BSD raiders? Those people who take and take from BSD or similarly licensed software for closed-source projects (often shrink-wrapped products on which they make a killing) without ever giving a line of code back are very much like a virus. They go around producing more closed-source software. When they find a piece of open-sourced software they can commandeer for their own purposes, they do so. Then they go on to make more closed-source software using what was meant to be open-source software. A virus goes around, waiting to fall into some foreign body where it can infiltrate a cell and turn the cell's work against the foreign body to produce and spread more virus. See the analogy?

The GPL, OTOH, doesn't turn other existing software into GPL. Some BSD code might be included in a GPL project, and the changes to that might be called GPL, but that's bad form on the part of the people doing that. The proper way to borrow BSD code for a GPL project is to modularize BSD code and contribute the changes needed to make the module back to the BSD community, then connect to that module from your GPL code in a different source file.

In the case of writing a new application around a bit of GPL, nobody's forcing you to use that GPled code as a starting point. If you're taking advantage of that code, the law (not just RMS) says you're (probably) making a derivative work. In court, a judge might make decisions about scope and size. If you're not a judge or at least a damn good lawyer, it's not really smart to gamble on that. If you write a clone from documentation, then it's not derivative (but don't steal the documentation against its license -- you might have to write your own without quoting directly).

I write software for a living. Some of my original stuff has a proprietary license. Some of my original stuff is BSD or public domain. Some is GPL. I use a lot of GPL code in some situations and I have no issue passing the code on to customers. My customers aren't generally other programmers, but I figure if they can find me and hire me, then they can find and hire another programmer in the future. That's freedom for the end user, because if I sell the customer a closed-source, proprietary application then their new programmer can't do anything with it. I often contribute back to the central project maintainers. In all, the work that the GPL has saved me has far outweighed the work I've invested in my return contributions. I don't consider that a bad deal.

Re:Is it really a good thing?

[RAMMS EIN]

Open source is growing. Twenty years ago, virtually nobody had heard about it. Ten years ago, all the cool kids were talking about it, but few people were using it, and companies usually used it in secret. Now, open source is virtually everywhere. All the major players in the computer world are using it and advertising that they are. It's in many home routers. Most organizations I have been to in the past years have at least a Linux box somewhere. The one company I've visited that didn't was a Microsoft shop that developed using the latest Microsoft tools and a bunch of open source libraries. Few people know what open source is, but more and more people have interacted with it in some way.

Linux, Apache, Firefox? The number of people using those is enormous. Perl, PHP, and MySQL are huge, too. And now Java is going open source, which means that a huge part of commercial software development will be done using open source (to the extent that this wasn't true already; think JBoss, Ant, et al.)

Last, but not least, open source is on the desktop. And I don't just mean the odd geek who runs Linux on his desktop. I've already mentioned Firefox, but let's not forget that everybody who uses a Mac uses open source.

Really, open source is all around us.