Popular languages for Open Source development

One question was always of my interest right since I started working as a Open Source Data Analyst at SAP Labs, Palo Alto: Which is the most popular/used language in the Open Source development? Thus, I decided to do an analysis of number of projects where a particular language is used. The list below shows the top ten entries.

Language	Percentage
Java	18.6
C++	17.3
C	16.0
PHP	13.2
Perl	6.1
Python	5.0
C#	3.8
JavaScript	3.5
Visual Basic	2.1
Delphi/Kylix	2.0
Unix Shell	1.9
Assembly	1.5
PL/SQL	1.1
Others	7.8

Then I thought that this metric is not a fair metric for evaluation. First reason is that the projects are not of the same size in terms of Lines of Code and secondly there are is large variation among the number of developers for an open source project. Then I rank ordered the languages by the total number of lines of code for a particular language. The results are as follows.

Name	Ratio
C/C++	47.29%
Java	26.90%
PHP	7.63%
C#	5.17%
JavaScript	3.44%
Python	3.00%
Perl	2.22%
Pascal	1.15%
Ruby	0.93%
shell script	0.75%
Tcl	0.75%
Objective C	0.51%
Emacs Lisp	0.17%
Erlang	0.07%
Scheme	0.02%

Here we can see that C/C++ has much more impact than Java. This can be contributed to large projects in C/C++ like Linux where there is a lot of effort involved. On the other hand even though Java has larger number of projects they are smaller in size and effort.

Audience/target industry for the Open Source Development

Open source is targeted for development of tools and software’s for the developers. The results below show that 31% of open source projects have a target audience as developers. These projects mainly deal with producing easy to use applications for software development like Eclipse, SVN. CVS etc...
Second in the list is the desktop applications for end-users which has about 26% share. These applications which may serve as a substitute for commercial licenses software’s are targeted at the end user. Examples in this category include Open Office, R, and Weka.
Interestingly there are some applications which have audiences in area of religion, legal industry and education. A list of top 20 audience/target industry for open source projects is summarized below.

Popular Open Source Licenses

After solving the question for number of licenses for a single project (please refer my earlier blog ‘Open Source Licenses’ posted on 1-Jul-2007) I got engaged in exploring the actual license which is used most frequently. I used the same data (August 2006 – Ossmole) for the analysis. The results are as follows.




The GNU GPL license dominates the open source development by accounting for more than 64% of the projects. All the other licenses seems to be very project specific and not used widely among the Open Source community barring the 'somewhat' popular BSD license which accounts for about 7% projects.