Do Excellence, Enterprise Readiness and Popularity go together in Open Source?
Doing some analysis of the EOS Directory listed projects and user feedback in terms of implicit popularity feedback (project page views) we came up with the following interesting correlation between Popularity and Excellence:
There clearly seems to be some correlation between the excellence/quality of Open Source projects and the popularity on EOS Directory.
So “being better” pays off in Open Source. Well, this is what you expect anyway, right. Interesting though is the category “business applications”. As analyzed in an earlier blog entry, business applications are clearly the most popular on EOS Directory, despite their partially less excellent ratings. However the need for alternatives to the incumbent proprietary technologies is so big, that enterprises more and more look for Open Source options here, pushing up the popularity of this category.
On the EOS home page the most popular five projects are listed, but this is basically the ranking since the creation of EOS Directory. But what are the most popular 20 projects of the last 12 months?
# Project
1 Nuxeo EP 5
2 KnowledgeTree
3 Alfresco
4 Pentaho
5 vtiger CRM
6 Darwin Kernel
7 Nagios
8 phpBB
9 Apache
10 Tomcat (Apache)
11 MySQL
12 PostgreSQL
13 SugarCRM
14 Drupal
15 Python
16 Trac
17 Lucene (Apache)
18 Java
19 Zimbra
20 Django
This list actually tells a lot. Not only represent these 20 projects almost one third of all the “project page views”, the popularity also shows the interest in specific categories and subcategories in EOS Directory. Clearly, business applications and in particular Enterprise Content Management and CRM are very popular. The fact that 40% of the projects are business applications clearly shows the interest of enterprises in deploying these in their business. This is clearly a change compared to 2006 or 2007. And of course the financial crisis and the recession “help” here. The three most popular projects are all ECM technologies, this is telling as well.
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December 18th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Interesting article. Even though the excellence of ‘business applications’ was considered low the interest was high. Definitely, an indicator of growing interest and future potential demand for open source business applications like CMS and CRM. In a down economy, more and more enterprises are at least considering open source software for more than just infrastructure and services. This bodes well for companies like SugarCRM, Alfresco and Compiere. What about open source BI? Is the same level of interest there as a sub-category??