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

But let’s not confuse an OSS census like Open Logic appears to be proposing with an IDC or Gartner forecast (or other unpublished work from these research houses) as one of the blogs seems to do.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

Having been a change agent for Open Sourcing internally (corporate controlled/firewalled Open Source) within an organization and externally with the production of true Open Source software, I think it is far-fetched to expect that the customer would play an active/proactive role in an Open Source project. It would be a dream if they did, but then really if they did why would they need the you (the consultant role)? Can you have a product, that is open, and funded/sponsored by a customer? Yes. But, this is a completely different line of thinking.

Taking a look at http://producingoss.com reveals many roles for all stakeholders. The customer fits some well, and others just don’t make sense. The bottom line is that there is a huge difference between consuming and producing Open Source. Refining the argument around the two definitions will change your closing questions dramatically.

Thanks again

Ryck - Community Manager — EOS Directory

There is an interesting post over at www.eosdirectory.com…

Roberto

Danese Cooper, Open Source Diva, Intel and Open Source Initiative
Brian Behlendorf, Founder & CTO, CollabNet
Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google, Inc.
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Social Text
John Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO, SugarCRM
Michael Tiemann, Vice President, Open Source Affairs, RedHat, Inc.

Track: Emerging Topics
Date: Wednesday, July 25
Time: 11:35am - 12:20pm
Location: Portland 252

This is a panel about who gets to decide what open source is (or is not)…what open source really “means” at the end of the day. Tim O’Reilly used to talk at OSCON about the importance of “unintended consequences” in the Open Source Effect but these days we’re seeing companies and associations calling themselves open source but, in fact, working pretty hard to limit the possible consequences to their business models (including but not limited to creative attempts to attach consequences to code reuse as in Badgewear licenses). Is this a necessary component of the marriage of open source and Web 2.0?

Also in the last quarter we’ve seen the formation of several new “associations” such as the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Alliance in the U.S. Big business is still really interested in open source. Does this mean that marketing will increasingly frame the conversation around what is or isn’t open source, or is there still a place for the Hacker ethic? Is the Hacker ethic even appropriate in cases where there is no distribution trigger?

I am glad that you are adding the capability for people to suggest additions to the directory. I don’t understand what criteria you used to create the initial database. There is a strange mix of great enterprise apps and some small, obscure projects without much enterprise potential. In the meantime, dozens of popular open source apps are missing from this directory. I hope that you will enter suggestions quickly, without requiring an evaluation and rating by Optaros. You can leave your rating as blank until you have reviewed the software, but the community will get to work quickly on rating these projects.

Lastly, I am glad that you are focusing on “open source” as a requirement. I am pleased to see that you have removed the VMware ESX entry, which is great software, but not even a hint related to open source. I suggest that you replace it with VirtualBox, an excellent open source virtualization tool.

Keep up the good work!