Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Tuesday January 16, 2007

Good news! Sun is leader of OpenSource contributions!
The European Commission on FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) has released a new report on the Economic Impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness on the Information and Communication Technologies sector. One of their findings is interesting that  Sun contributes to and participates in more open source projects than any other commercial company, including IBM, Red Hat, Novell and HP. See this report for all details:  http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf
This doesnt even include the OpenSourcing of Java!
Other interesting tidbits gleaned from this:

• 62% of code is developed by individuals; about 19% by "industry" and another 12% by education institutions
• India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers; China is second
• The monetary value of voluntary contributions is about 800Million Euros per year; half of which comes from Europe
• FLOSS potentially saves the industry about 36% of R&D costs, which can be invested elsewhere
• US still leads in terms of large FLOSS-related businesses
• Only 3-4% of firms in Japan have adopted Linux; in Europe that number is around 35-40%
• The top FLOSS usage is in: Linux, OpenOffice, PostgreSQL/MySQL and Mozilla/FireFox
• UC (Berkeley), MIT and CMU are the leading educational institutions that contribute to FLOSS development
  
• Sun outranks #2 IBM,  #3 RedHat, #4 SGI. Sun outpaces IBM by over 3x in contribution; 5x over RedHat
• The most important reason developers participate in open source communities is to learn new skills for free

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