Open Source Census: Will enterprise usage get counted?
Open source solutions provider OpenLogic just announced the Open Source Census, “a new
collaborative initiative to quantify the global use of open source in
enterprises.”
“Enterprises will be able to scan any of their computers and contribute the scan results back into The Open Source Census database [and] the basic anonymous aggregate data collected through The Open Source Census will be provided for free on a web site. This aggregate data will list the number of times each project has been installed on computers across all participating enterprises.”
The plan starts with the release of the Open Source Discovery application under the new Affero GPLv3 license plus an effort to enlist developers, software firms and ISVs in support of the project.
About time, too. Everyone seems to think an initiative of this type is long overdue. Shane Schick’s Computerworld (Canada) blog notes the unreliability of both Canadian and US software piracy figures — which are statistical estimates — because the groups simply ignore open source applications. Remarking on the census, he adds:
“This would be a lot more accurate than the market forecasting that the Gartners, IDCs and Forresters of the world do. … For an industry that is focused on the management of information, it’s surprising how willingly IT professionals are to be left in the dark about the true state of the market.”
More posts on this topic include:
- Census started for enterprise open source use (The 451 Group)
- How much open source software are businesses really using? (BetaNews)
- OpenLogic wants to count open source users (InfoWorld)
Are you in the dark about open source? Post a comment and tell us what you know — or don’t know — about the open source usage in your organization.
Entries (RSS)
December 13th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Over at ebizQ’, we strongly support this effort by Open Logic for the reasons you suggest and the linked-to blog posts suggest:
– addressing the challenge of measuring “free,” and
– meeting the demand to produce a more accurate picture of the open source software (OSS) market.
But let’s not confuse an OSS census like Open Logic appears to be proposing with an IDC or Gartner forecast (or other unpublished work from these research houses) as one of the blogs seems to do. While the two research firms often release dollar-denominated top-level forecasts (and previous year results) out of context for their own PR purposes, they also both conduct detailed demand-side research among users about the users’ installed software and they both look at the market holistically so that they see OSS in context with all other user activity. This work forms the basis of the forecasts many OSS true believers like to criticize.
I am familiar with this because I did such research for a company that is now part of Gartner and for IDC from 1991 to 2006. Speaking from my IDC experience (because it is more recent), the forecasts have been very accurate except for the hiccup in 2001 following 9/11. Since almost all widely installed OSS is monetized in some way (”free” but with a service contract, dual license, enterprise editions, SaaS subscriptions, and so forth), measuring by money is absolutely fair despite what the skeptics say. But it is also important to understand if true free-as-in-air OSS is displacing any of these new and traditional revenue streams.
From my current research, there is no indication that that is happening but we’ll never get a truly accurate picture unless a census includes all software, not just software licensed under a certain fairly limited set of terms and conditions (that is the three or four dozen OSS license options). To really end the bickering over these numbers by perpetual skeptics and for governments to better set economic policy, we need to know both the numerator (OSS prevalence) and the denominator (total software installed). I think of that fraction as the open choice quotient.
Still let’s applaud OpenLogic. We have to start somewhere.
Dennis
December 13th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Dennis:
Thanks so much for your detailed comment. Interesting that you extend the census value beyond software market analysis to policy issues. Of course, governments use a population census for the same purpose and it turns out this is a key role of government in setting policy. I wonder if OpenLogic can encourage participation by making this comparison.
Thanks again!
Ryck Lent, Community Manager
EOS Directory