Busted — 5 open source myths
p2pnet news | Open Source:- Five myths about open source software have been busted, says Black Duck Software.
Drawing from its knowledge base of open source code mined from nearly 4,000 websites, its research, “sheds light on OS projects and community,” says the company.
Beyond user surveys, there’s little actual data on the dynamic open source software industry, it says, going on:
“As a result, some inaccuracies have prevailed, including the belief that open source developers have created only a few billion lines of code.”
Black Duck spiders the Net collecting code into a giant core repository with more than 170,000 open source projects from nearly 4,000 unique web sites, it states, promising it’s the, “largest collection of open source software in the industry”.
Among the myths the company says it’s laid to rest is the contention GPL Version 3 is being ignored.
Here’s the lineup a la Black Duck »»»
Open Source is just source code
Source code is actually only 15% of what is released by open source developers. There are four times as many binary files as source files in open source releases. In addition to binaries, open source projects are packaged with scripts, markup language files, graphics images, documentation and many other artifacts.
Open Source adoption is mostly application infrastructure
There is a tendency to focus on adoption of monolithic applications in IT infrastructure, for example, Linux or MySQL. The Black Duck KnowledgeBase shows that the open source world is dominated by components, not fully formed applications, and these are being reused from project to project in hundreds and even thousands of instances. One example, Apache Log4j is reused by over 5500 projects. Java developers, in particular, have taken tremendous advantage of code reuse. There are 14 times more files distributed ending in the .class file suffix (binaries) than .java (source files). A major reason is that Java components are built once and reused and redistributed by many other projects in binary form.
There are a few billion lines of code out there
This figure is an order of magnitude too low. There are tens of billions of lines of open source code available on the Internet. In addition, twenty-three percent of all downloadable code was released or renewed in 2008. Over 90% of open source code is written in the major languages: C, C++, Java, Javascript and C#, however, dozens of languages are used. Figure 2 below breaks down open source by line count.
Real programmers do NOT comment
Open source developers create about one comment line for every four lines of source code. The most commented programming language is Java with more than one comment line for every two lines of code. The least commented language is Boo; a python-inspired programming language that operates within the .net framework. Table 1 and 2 show the most and least commented languages used in open source code.
And on GPL V3, “First released in June 2007, GPL version 3 has grown from zero to over 6,300 projects,” says Black Duck, adding:
“In terms of project adoption, it has surpassed the CPL, Mozilla, MIT and Apache licenses. GPLv3 is now the fifth most chosen license in the open source community and if the current trend continues, it will surpass BSD for the number four spot in a year or two. About 70% of all open source projects use a variant of the GPL license.”
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Black Duck Software – Black Duck Software Busts Myths About Application Development, December 10, 2008
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