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?

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.

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??

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.

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.

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?

[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...