Open Source Census

Although we briefly talked about open source in class, here’s some news about it from the business side on nytimes.com. The article reports that an Open-source management company called OpenLogic launched the Open Source Census, which is the first detailed survey to find out how businesses use open source software. The purpose behind this survey is to deal with “the lack of information that accompanies the lack of proprietary licensing restrictions,” which has been a long-standing problem in the open-source world. In fact, according to open-source specialists, businesses often are unaware of the type of open-source software that is installed in their systems while analyst firms use guesswork to estimate the adoption of open-source in businesses. As a sponsor of this project, IDC program director Matt Lawton said,

"The Open Source Census will provide the industry with much more granular information about where downloads are being installed, enabling both customers and IT solution providers to better understand the true impact that open-source software is having.”

Other sponsors include CollabNet, Holme Roberts & Owen, Navica, Olliance Group, the Open Solutions Alliance, the Open Source Business Foundation, O'Reilly Media, and Unisys

This project is based on a tool called OSS Discovery, which scans systems for known open-source projects and then anonymously submits the data to an OpenLogic database. The scan results will produce detailed, but anonymized reports that summarize the businesses own open-source usage and provide comparison data of other similar companies. OpenLogic are allowing businesses to access these results on an ongoing basis to encourage reluctant companies to contribute their data. Currently, OSS Discovery and the aggregate results are available from the Open Source Census Web site. But the census is still in its early stages. There are fewer than 100,000 open-source installations.