Shalin Says - The Total Growth of Open Source

Full Article: http://shal.in/post/330194280/the-total-growth-of-open-source 

Amit Desh­pande and Dirk Riehle from SAP Labs have conducted and published a research on the growth of open source software.

The data has been culled from Ohloh.net and is based on the stats and activity of around 5000 open source projects written in 30 different languages and 103 open source licenses.

Some interesting quotes from the publication:

Suc­cess­ful open source projects like Linux, Apache, Post­greSQL and many oth­ers are grow­ing super-linearly. Pre­vi­ous research showed that lin­ear and qua­dratic growth is the dom­i­nant growth pat­tern of open source soft­ware projects

Our work shows that the addi­tions to open source projects, the total project size (mea­sured in source lines of code), the num­ber of new open source projects, and the total num­ber of open source projects are grow­ing at an expo­nen­tial rate. The total amount of source code and the total num­ber of projects dou­ble about every 14 months.

Open Source has taken off handsomely and continues to thrive. It is not just about philosophy any more, it is good business sense.

In case you are interested about Solr stats, see the Solr project page at Ohloh.