Open Source Census Reveals Trends After More Than 275,000 Installations of Open Source Software Found to Date

Published 7th August 2008

Open Source Census Officials Present Status Update of The Census at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo

BROOMFIELD, CO, Aug 06, 2008 -- The Open Source Census, a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, today announced at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo it has identified more than 275,000 open source installations on more than 2,000 machines.
Kim Weins, senior vice president of products and marketing at OpenLogic, presented a status of the Census results Wednesday before the 9:00 a.m. Oracle keynote at LinuxWorld.
Firefox ranked as the most installed open source project. Zlib, Xerces, Xalan, and Wget are the second, third, fourth, and fifth, respectively. Participants span a wide variety of company sizes, geographies, and industries.

Main themes found by The Open Source Census revealed in today's presentation are:
-- Ubuntu (45%) and Debian (14%) are the most used Linux distributions
among participants with Linux machines
-- More than half of the open source software found has been on Windows
machines
-- The number of unique installed open source packages ranged from 22-62
per machine

The Open Source Census also found data that is contrary to common held ideas regarding the popularity of various open source projects:
-- Ruby, PHP and Python each were on 29% of machines, while Perl (45%) is
the most common open source development language
-- Hsqldb (45%) is the most common database, most likely because it is
bundled as the default DB with many open source software components; MySQL
(27%) is twice as common as Postgres (12%)
-- More than 65% of participants are located outside of the United States

To view the electronic presentation, please visit http://www.slideshare.net/OpenLogic/os-census-at-linuxworld2008.

To participate in the Census, visit www.osscensus.org.