Open Source Growing At an Exponential Rate

sipmeister writes "Two computer scientists who work for enterprise software giant SAP have shown that open source is growing at an exponential rate. Not only is the code base growing exponentially, but also the number of viable projects. Researchers Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle analyzed the database of open source startup ohloh.net and looked at the last 16 years of growth in open source. They consistently got the best fit for the data using an exponential model. Relating this to open source market revenue, Desphande and Riehle conclude that open source is eating into closed source at a non-trivial pace."

I for one

[setagllib]

I for one welcome our new open source overlords :)

Re:I for one

[cptnapalm]

Oh, thank you! My, what a friendly bunch of abject servants you all are. I simply must tell all my fellow FOSS overlords all about how sweet you all have been in accepting the yoke placed around your necks by our imperious hands.

Re:

[DaveV1.0]

Why is it when I read your comment, I heard it spoken in an effete British accent.

Re:I for one

[montyzooooma]

Were your lips moving when you read it?

Re:

[number1scatterbrain]

I don't know. The Google super-geniuses are already beginning to worry me...

Re:I for one

[francium de neobie]

Why waste time welcoming us when you can contribute and become an overlord yourself? ;)

Re:I for one

[smittyoneeach]

But if everyone is an overlord, who are the serfs?
Or is that the real point?

Re:

[antek9]

In the end, there will only remain the Overlords, and then the Microserfs. You should know that.

You will hear them cry in agony: - Those damned developers, developers, developers, developers!

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Here is a glimpse of a future video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSYV-nEE300 [youtube.com]

Re:I for one

[hey!]

And poetically, "Operation Overlord" was the code name for the allied invasion of Normandy, which signaled the beginning of the end of the European war.

Of course, we are much more at what Churchill would have termed the "end of the beginning" stage when it comes to free software, and in that spirit I offer a Churchill quotation that is rather apt:

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a war of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age."

Of course, it's not precisely true that "their deeds will never be recorded", at least if they are using source control as they should.

Re:

[aldousd666]

That's a rather ridiculous analogy. If people couldn't make any money on software, there would be a lot less of it, and especially a lot less commercial software and design for open source to emulate and 'replace'. Open source can grow faster than proprietary partly because they have taken ideas that were developed after much ado and investment by companies that actually had to pay to come up with it. I'm not saying open source is bad, but trying to kill proprietary software with it entirely is very bad.

Re:

[superwiz]

That's a rather ridiculous analogy. If people couldn't make any money on software, there would be a lot less of it, and especially a lot less commercial software and design for open source to emulate and 'replace'. Open source can grow faster than proprietary partly because they have taken ideas that were developed after much ado and investment by companies that actually had to pay to come up with it. I'm not saying open source is bad, but trying to kill proprietary software with it entirely is very bad.

Perhaps your signature is very telling, as well:

Who is John Galt?

In that spirit, what would Howard Roark do if faced with the choice of writing software that can be easily "used by common men" vs writing software that was of the best quality? Almost no theoretical software research is conducted by private interests anymore. I would argue that it is because we don't have software patents and math patents (business-method patents are not the same thing), but that's a different argument. The fact is that under the curren

Re:

[aldousd666]

Howard Roark is not my dogmatic model ;) But I get the point. If you're going to use novels as a guideline lets not forget who looks more like a looter than whom. However, I don't actually think using OSS makes anyone a looter, after all the even exchange (their satisfaction of contribution and recognition) they get out of it was of their own free will. This isn't to say that a number of it's consumers don't have that mentality. The guy who damns debian because they don't have a driver for his particular s

Re:

[aldousd666]

sorry, yeah, I misunderstood your intention. I took your summary to be your personal opinion not a summary of the parent.

Re:

[Maxo-Texas]

Hmmm.

Well we could use Gates... die his hair black and have him grow a little mustache. And he would have to take up painting but suck at it -- or perhaps develop a bad painting program.

Linus seems a little too young, doesn't smoke as much, doesn't drink as much, and lacks the cool british accent Churchill had.

Richard is a bit crazy-- seems more of a pol pot than anything in WWII-- perhaps a japanese type with "fight to the death".

In general I think that Opensource is, to a large extent, a war of large cor

Re:

[hey!]

I don't think we need to compare, say, Bill Gates to Hitler. Nor do I think that proprietary software is tantamount to Naziism.

At least if we draw our analogies from history so literally, we'd be better off not knowing any history at all.

The apt part of the analogy here is that there are so many people to whom so many are are indebted to, we can scarcely begin to enumerate them, much less name them.

I don't think the existence of proprietary software is inconsistent with a free civil society. But I do bel

Re:

[CSMatt]

I'm not sure if it's this post that invokes Godwin's Law or the one above it.

Re:

[jonbryce]

I'd say it is more like the battle between democracy and communism.

Re:

[david_thornley]

He did take the name of something like a video game character, or somebody of similar intellect. Searle wrote his whole Chinese Room argument apparently without realizing that (a) it's a classic example of the fallacy known as "begging the question", (b) it shows no sign that Searle has ever encountered the concept of "emergent behavior", and (c) Searle seems to think that "intentionality" is not merely a confused word used by philosophers to obfuscate interesting questions, but is also produced biologica

Re:

[debatem1]

I'm sorry, but you're discussing things in a reasonable and intelligent manner. Your Intertubes license is officially revoked. Turn in your e-peen at the counter.

Re:I for one

[tsm_sf]

I think it's hilarious that you took the time to come back and proofread your troll. That's craftsmanship.

Viral License?

[phantomcircuit]

So the accusation that the GPL is a viral license wasn't just a bunch of bullshit?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL concerns free software, no open source software. This study has no bearing on how 'viral' the GPL is.

Re:

[jd]

Wrong exponent. Turns out it's closer to rabbits.

Re:

[sgt scrub]

As in "Silly Rabbits" or "No! Not the killer rabbit!"

Let me think...

[jd]

It ends up in the most extraordinary, improbable circumstances. It's hunted by fudd. It survives anything thrown at it. Nyahhhhhhhhhh. What's up,*.doc?

Re:Viral License?

[howlingmadhowie]

i find complaints about the GPL being viral somewhat amusing, seeing as it is invariably closed-source software which is viral and forces everybody else to buy it if they want to interact with it. the GPL however produces free software which everybody can interact with as they wish.

Re:

[Teckla]

i find complaints about the GPL being viral somewhat amusing, seeing as it is invariably closed-source software which is viral and forces everybody else to buy it if they want to interact with it. the GPL however produces free software which everybody can interact with as they wish.

Source code that is licensed under the GPL is viral in nature. Richard Stallman wrote the GPL that way on purpose so that it would tend to spread to more and more source code. It's his weapon of choice to help shape the software world the way he thinks is best.

I don't personally agree with his belief that all source code should be open, as I believe that party A should have the freedom to buy closed source software from party B if that is their choice. Mr. Stallman would have you believe that party A and

Re:

[xappax]

Ok, so you don't like big bossy Stallman trying to tell you what to do. That's fine. But characterizing the GPL as some kind of tool to prevent voluntary exchanges is silly.

It comes down to this: either you believe in "intellectual property" rights or not. If you do, whenever a developer creates code, it's their property, and they can establish whatever conditions they like for other people getting to use it. Some people use the GPL as their conditions. They're not saying they swear allegiance to St

Re:

[Bralkein]

You make it sound like the GPL is a deadly weapon that seeks out closed-source software and destroys it! The GPL describes a list of freedoms and restrictions governing the use of a piece of software. If a developer agrees with those items on the list, then they can apply them to their own software. If they do this, then as a bonus they will be able to make full use of code from other GPL users, because they agree on the rules governing its use.

Now, this doesn't preclude a copyright holder from making ot

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

You have software and protocols mixed up. It is open standards for file formats, protocols, etc. that allows interoperability. Open source is mainly a way to put the users of the software in control of the software: you don't have to rely on the vendor for bugfixes and other improvements, as you would with closed source software. Of course, it is also true that open source developers (including users) tend to favor open standards, but they are still different things.

Re:Viral License?

[jrumney]

You can make up hypothetical situations as much as you like, the fact is that if a library is useful, and there has been a GPLed library available for years, then someone somewhere will be selling a commercial library that does the same thing, which you can use in your proprietary project. Even if that were not true, there is no sense in crying about the fact that you can't profit from other people's software without giving something back.

Re:

[BytePusher]

Not to mention, most open source libraries with equivalent proprietary versions are released under the LGPL, which allows users to link without revealing their source code.

"The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program itself but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely links with the program."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGPL)

Re:

[LWATCDR]

"Even if that were not true, there is no sense in crying about the fact that you can't profit from other people's software without giving something back."
Sure you can. Take a look at all the websites that use MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, and or Drupal.
Or any number of ISPs that use Linux and Apache on their servers.
Yes you can make money off other peoples software and give nothing back.

Re:

[LWATCDR]

Not at all. What you don't get is that yes I can make a ton of money off of GPL without ever giving back a dime at all. An ISP running Linux is using FOSS and making money from it. They never have to give one dollar or one line of code to do it.
What you can not do is make money as a programmer off of GPL code without giving back. Well even then you can as well. So no it is one of the myths of GPL that you can not make money off of the code without giving something back.
I have no problem with people writing

Re:Viral License?

[Bert64]

If this code you want to reuse is GPL, then the author clearly didn't want you packaging up his code into a closed source game and selling it...
You still have the choice of releasing it as GPL and still selling it, most games players won't go to the trouble of downloading and compiling the source themselves.

And how is this worse than proprietary software? I doubt any closed source vendor would allow you to package up their code as part of your product either...

Lockout chip business model

[tepples]

If this code you want to reuse is GPL, then the author clearly didn't want you packaging up his code into a closed source game and selling it... You still have the choice of releasing it as GPL and still selling it

The GPLv3 is compatible with selling copies, and it is also compatible with selling copies bundled with proprietary non-program assets such as textures, models, maps, sound effects, and music. But its requirement to provide Installation Information is not compatible with the licenses for the lockout chips in all four major consoles (PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii) and both major handhelds (DS, PSP).

Subtle critical flaw in your logic there ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

"You still have the choice of releasing it as GPL and still selling it, most games players won't go to the trouble of downloading and compiling the source themselves."

Actually, only one person needs to download and compile the source (for each platform.) He can then post the resultant binary for others to download and run.

Re:

[dookiesan]

If I wrote an xml-reader I wouldn't want someone selling a toolkit for xml manipulation using my code. They would be taking credit for my work. However, if someone wants to use that same code for reading their config files, I would be ok with that.

I'm not trying to speak for every author of GPL code, but I don't believe it is consistent with some intentions. If there is a license that prevents the former situation, but allows the latter that would be great. No one can resell any upgrade to my xml-reader

Re:

[aproposofwhat]

Poor little student - what better way to learn than to reimplement the algorithms?

If you want to make money, put the work in!

What this study highlights to me is that despite the protestations of the patent / copyright lobbies, free software promotes innovation, rather than the profit motive.

As I say - if you want to charge, then put the work in - it's not as though it's hard.

Re:

[tomandlu]

Heh - having now read up on the LGPL, I'm feeling a bit silly. On the plus-side, yay me! I reinvented the wheel!

Re:freedom and the GPL

[mr_mischief]

Stop whining already and write your own versions of everything from scratch or using a BSD-alike license. It's not evil for someone who writes software to tell you you can't blatantly rip off their work.

Commercial libraries often are far more "viral". They often have per-copy royalties. They often say you can't reveal the source of any part of your application using the library to a third party, for fear their API will get out and be cloned. People who have licensed commercial libraries and source code to build a project often have a hard time opening the source either BSD or GPL later. In some cases, they even have trouble contributing to a competing open-source project ( see SCO vs. IBM ).

If you want a good virus analogy, how about the BSD raiders? Those people who take and take from BSD or similarly licensed software for closed-source projects (often shrink-wrapped products on which they make a killing) without ever giving a line of code back are very much like a virus. They go around producing more closed-source software. When they find a piece of open-sourced software they can commandeer for their own purposes, they do so. Then they go on to make more closed-source software using what was meant to be open-source software. A virus goes around, waiting to fall into some foreign body where it can infiltrate a cell and turn the cell's work against the foreign body to produce and spread more virus. See the analogy?

The GPL, OTOH, doesn't turn other existing software into GPL. Some BSD code might be included in a GPL project, and the changes to that might be called GPL, but that's bad form on the part of the people doing that. The proper way to borrow BSD code for a GPL project is to modularize BSD code and contribute the changes needed to make the module back to the BSD community, then connect to that module from your GPL code in a different source file.

In the case of writing a new application around a bit of GPL, nobody's forcing you to use that GPled code as a starting point. If you're taking advantage of that code, the law (not just RMS) says you're (probably) making a derivative work. In court, a judge might make decisions about scope and size. If you're not a judge or at least a damn good lawyer, it's not really smart to gamble on that. If you write a clone from documentation, then it's not derivative (but don't steal the documentation against its license -- you might have to write your own without quoting directly).

I write software for a living. Some of my original stuff has a proprietary license. Some of my original stuff is BSD or public domain. Some is GPL. I use a lot of GPL code in some situations and I have no issue passing the code on to customers. My customers aren't generally other programmers, but I figure if they can find me and hire me, then they can find and hire another programmer in the future. That's freedom for the end user, because if I sell the customer a closed-source, proprietary application then their new programmer can't do anything with it. I often contribute back to the central project maintainers. In all, the work that the GPL has saved me has far outweighed the work I've invested in my return contributions. I don't consider that a bad deal.

Re:

[Mr. Jaggers]

A virus goes around, waiting to fall into some foreign body where it can infiltrate a cell and turn the cell's work against the foreign body to produce and spread more virus. See the analogy?

The GPL, OTOH, doesn't turn other existing software into GPL.

So, other than the BSD (and other essentially public-domain code with hardly any protections to speak of), it's true the the GPL affects new code development primarily.

Interesting. It seems the GPL takes "base materials" (non-code, such as time, programmers, c

Re:

[WNight]

Wah! Wah! They won't give you everything totally for free.

If you want a clue what a virus is, go catch SARS. You don't have to explicitly link it into your DNA, it does that for you if someone else nearby has it. Then it kills you. Fucking retard.

We have multiple terms for a reason. If you mean self-perpetuating, just say that. You'd still be wrong, as the GPL is just some words in a file. It doesn't do anything, perpetuating or not. Programmers who think RMS's code sharing is a good idea perpetuate it, oft

Re:Viral License?

[IBBoard]

Only if your virus is of the "make you freer, healthier and happier" type.

Re:

[Alsee]

They can't cure the common cold, but of course the government cures THAT virus.

-

Re:

[apt142]

I don't know if the growth has anything to do with being viral. Growth of software in general is probably exponential.

Another thought is that there is a lot of code out there to build on. So, a lot of new projects are probably modifying and forking existing code. Or just building on top of them. When you have the power to do that you can specify how you like things. For example: How many flavors of Linux are there compared to varieties of Windows? Compare that to the number of users in each camp.

Extra Extra

[Idiomatick]

Something commonly found on the internet increases in growth exponentially.

Seriously it would be emberassing if it werent. The # of people who have seen goatse has gone up 1000s of times in the last year. That doesnt make distended anuses cool. Ty for the non-news.

Re:

[argent]

Yah, I'd like to see them do the same curve fit for commercial software. If it's not also exponential I'll eat your hat.

(not mine, it's icky)

Competition

[AKAImBatman]

Relating this to open source market revenue, Desphande and Riehle conclude that open source is eating into closed source at a non-trivial pace.

Welcome to competition. Open Source tends to cover the areas where software is well established and should be commoditized. As much as we'd all like to keep charging $250 a copy for a library to unzip files, technology marches on. Commercial providers of technology must work harder to win the dollars of their customer. And I for one think the results can only be positive.

What's particularly interesting to note is that web services are the latest craze in software development. The idea is that the value is not so much in the software itself, but in the service provided. This means that both using and supporting Open Source development can help these companies deliver real value to their customers rather than twiddling their thumbs on problems that are long-solved.

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

What's particularly interesting to note is that web services are the latest craze in software development.

Sorry, I must have missed that memo. How many major name web services actually make money today?

I would wager that the overwhelming majority of software development is still nothing to do with web services, and moreover that those web services that do have real value to someone are mostly (like a lot of software) written for in-house use and not to make money through the software-as-a-service model. I would also wager that of those businesses set up to operate on a software-as-a-service model, very few

Re:Competition

[AKAImBatman]

Sorry, I must have missed that memo. How many major name web services actually make money today?

A lot more than you think, apparently. My last two employers have provided services over the web in the Financial and Health Care industries. They're both rather well-off from that business alone.

A more visible example would be news and blog sites. Quite a few of them make a killing off of advertisements. Their profit models are more difficult to maintain than direct service costs, I'll grant you, but many do well for themselves in spite of the challenges facing them.

On another note, I did just occur to me that I may have caused some confusion by using the term "web services". A lot of people think "SOAP" when they hear that term. While I do know a company or two who charges for access to their SOAP interface (basically, a really fancy remote database interface), I was referring primarily to the delivery of business services over the web. My apologies for any confusion. :-)

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ah, OK. If you're talking about anybody providing a service via the web, then sure, it's a significant part of the industry. I assumed you meant Web Services(TM)(R) (patent pending). :-)

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Welcome to competition. Open Source tends to cover the areas where software is well established and should be commoditized. As much as we'd all like to keep charging $250 a copy for a library to unzip files, technology marches on. Commercial providers of technology must work harder to win the dollars of their customer.''

I agree with the first part, but the last sentence isn't necessarily true. I've worked in commercial software development for some time now, and there has been an ongoing shift towards ope

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

I'm not really sure how you're disagreeing with me. In fact, it sounds like we're on the exact same page. I won't pay for ZIP libraries anymore because I can get Open Source products that do just as good of a job. But I will pay for GarageBand because it's an excellent product with no commoditized equivalent. Similarly, a lot of people pay for Photoshop because it still has a lot of high-end features that GIMP does not replicate. :-)

And what exponent?

[winmine]

Seriously, don't get the cynical mathematicians on /. going about hyperbole like "exponential rates".

Well, the exponent could be negative, did you think about that? Huh??

Re:

[JeanBaptiste]

and I for one cannot wait for the O(n log n) fanboys to debunk all this

It's not negative.

[jd]

It's i.

Re:

[sien]

Another way to express it would be to say it was sigmoidal [oreilly.com].

The code base is growing

[Soleen]

This is sad that code base of Open Source projects is growing exponentially. Projects become fat ugly and unmanageable. It is also getting harder to debug, port, and even use such programs. http://suckless.org/ [suckless.org] has several programs that do their job every well and yet very managable. For example window manager: dwm less than 2K lines of code, is the most feature complete WM I've seen. I've been using it as my main window manager for over year, and was very happy with it. There are few good CLI applications availble that hold approach of been efficient and useful and almost no GUI applications.

Re:

[Bert64]

There are some GUI apps that work well too, you just have to consider if a GUI is the best option for a particular app...
A good example i can think of is "xv", it's a program for viewing images and thus really needs to hook into a GUI of some kind. It hasn't really been updated since 1994, and is quite fast and stable, and most operations can be controlled from keyboard or GUI.

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

A good example i can think of is "xv", it's a program for viewing images and thus really needs to hook into a GUI of some kind.

For the record, if you didn't know already, xv is shareware and not Free Software. Imagemagick's "display" command is much more recent and under an open source license.

Re:

[fritsd]

Well, the article said that it was most likely only the *number* of projects that was growing exponentially, whereas their *size* (or in your words fat-, ugly- and unmanageable-ness; I know what you mean) was growing something more like quadratically.

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

The code base is not only growing, but a lot of that growth, I think, is due to a number of things:

* Increased project features. This is both a good and bad thing.
* New projects to implement things which haven't been done in open source yet; especially during the "start up" phase of dev, when there is no clear-cut project with momentum/mind share, there's going to be a lot of duplicated effort. And, of course, many of these projects simply get abandoned when efforts are focused.
* More projects. Each project

What is growing?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” — Bill Gates

The rest of us got over this particular naive metric years ago. The fact that lines of OSS code produced are growing exponentially doesn't tell us anything useful about how much useful stuff can now be done with OSS.

Moreover, the rate of growth now is not the interesting thing. The total volume of serious OSS is still relatively small, and so is its growth in absolute terms. The future potential is far more interesting to explore.

For example, if (as TFA tells us) packaged OSS generated revenues of $1.8B in 2006 and this was around 0.7% of total revenue generated from all packaged software sales, then I disagree with the article's claim that the OSS revenue was not trivial compared to the market as a whole. In business terms, 0.7% market share is nothing. On the other hand, if you also say that the OSS revenue is doubling every year while the total remains roughly constant, and you have evidence that this will continue giving exponential growth, then your data suggests that in a few years the OSS revenue very much will be significant.

However, I'm struggling to find data to support those claims on a first quick look at TFA. The pretty pictures just show that the volume of code is going up, which doesn't tell us anything about the value (economic or practical) of what's being written, nor what the future trends for that value are likely to be.

Re:What is growing?

[AKAImBatman]

- FireFox
- Apache Webserver
- Derby Database
- Sun Java Server Application Server (aka Glassfish)
- PDFBox
- TortoiseCVS
- OpenPortal
- Netbeans
- Rhino
- GWT
- POI
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Solaris
- BCEL
- ANT
- FOP
- Rome (RSS)
- FFMPEG
- VLC
- FileZilla
- GIMP
- DOSBox
- QEMU
- Cygwin
- JHDL
- Bouncy Castle
- jTDS
- PHP
- GCC

The list above is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of Open Source projects that I use and rely upon on a regular basis. It has grown significantly over the years, going from a relatively small list of key programs to permeating nearly every aspect of my day-to-day life and work. If you did a similar inventory of the OSS products you use, I wouldn't be surprised if you came up with a similarly growing list.

So while the article may not answer all your questions, some answers can be found by just looking closer to home. :-)

Re:What is growing?

[pembo13]

Let me pad your list a bit with things of the top of my head

• Subversion
• Linux
• MythTV
• OpenOffice.org
• Thunderbird
• Python
• Gtk
• Qt
• SQLite
• Audacity
• VLC
• GCC
• Eclipse
• KDE
• KDEvelop
• Notepad++
• Samba
• NFS
• OpenSSH
• Pidgin
• Inkscape

And thats just the stuff I use regularly.

Re:

[Basilius]

Two more significant solutions:

• Scribus
• Alfresco

Re:

[SatanicPuppy]

Missed a couple of my favs:

• Snort
• nmap
• Squid
• Emacs
• Tomcat
• Perl
• Hylafax
• Ethereal
• Ghostscript
• Sendmail
• rsync
• ImageMagick

Re:

[EWIPlayer]

Has anyone thought to ask what closed source is doing? Is it growing exponentially as well? Is it growing faster? Without something to compare it to, saying that OSS is growing exponentially is about as significant as saying it's growing linearly and all the best programmers have long hair.

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

"Bouncy Castle?"

But, seriously, all this tells me is that open source geeks use open source. Duh.

How about a survey of the average computer user, to find what open source apps they use? Getting data like this from Slashdot doesn't do anybody any good, and doesn't tell us anything useful.

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

"Bouncy Castle?"

Bouncy Castle: http://www.bouncycastle.org/ [bouncycastle.org]

Best crypto lib this side of the solar system. :-)

But, seriously, all this tells me is that open source geeks use open source. Duh.

That matters not. Just as all those open standards and government-provided data improves the quality of products in traditional industries, Open Source improves the level of quality in technological services. Joe Average doesn't really care how that PDF he's using came to be, but the engineers who created the solution he

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The list above is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of Open Source projects that I use and rely upon on a regular basis. It has grown significantly over the years, going from a relatively small list of key programs to permeating nearly every aspect of my day-to-day life and work. If you did a similar inventory of the OSS products you use, I wouldn't be surprised if you came up with a similarly growing list.

Sure, I use plenty of OSS, and I'm grateful to those who have contributed to it and then given it away for the benefit of others.

However, the list certainly isn't growing exponentially. There are a few major applications I use frequently — Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, a few programming-related tools — but I've been using these for a while. I won't need two web browsers next year, four the year after, and eight by 2011.

As I've often observed in these Slashdot discussions, OSS has a few

Re:

[ZorbaTHut]

Open-source, in my experience, is not particularly good at innovating. It is, however, quite good at commoditizing existing products, and in some notable cases (Firefox) it's good at improving existing systems to be far better than the original version.

Basically, if you make something new and exciting, and it's popular, and it provides a very useful service, but does so extremely badly, it's a prime candidate for being dominated by open-source.

Re:

[drspliff]

PHP
Perl
Xterm
XFCE
FUSE
OpenJDK
Claws Mail
Bash
ImageMagik
Asterisk
Wine
etc.

And I'm still finding fantastic projects on Sourceforge & Freshmeat nearly every day... with the result being that the whole software "ecosystem" that I live in is open-source, apart from Photoshop :)

Re:

[Jade E. 2]

The fact that lines of OSS code produced are growing exponentially doesn't tell us anything useful about how much useful stuff can now be done with OSS.

No, but it means we're going to get there eventually. Or haven't you heard the theory that a million code monkeys hammering at random on a million open source projects for infinity will eventually produce user friendly software to complete any imaginable task?

Re:

[fritsd]

As long as that imaginable task involves a depressed prince in Helsingør?

Re:

[wellingj]

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." -- Bill Gates

LOL. That fucker is one to talk. Ad Hominem FTW!

Re:

[epine]

The pretty pictures just show that the volume of code is going up, which doesn't tell us anything about the value (economic or practical) of what's being written, nor what the future trends for that value are likely to be.

Neither is the GDP a particularly good measure of economic progress, since the figure is quite happy to add a mess to the cost of cleaning up the mess and then tell you that you are quite wealthy.

LOC has the same problem: it will add lines of code creating a bug to lines of code working around the bug.

The purchase of an SUV adds to the GDP more than a less expensive vehicle. The SUV adds yet more to the GDP when it burns more gas to travel the same distance. If that SUV rolls over on the highway two year

Re:

[dodobh]

It isn't only about revenue growth. If OSS hits at infrastructure components, then a lot of vendors will find that their market is actually shrinking. So while value is being added, the actual size of the software market is no indicator of that value.

Economists have no idea of how to measure value not contributed in money, so a large sharing economy simply goes uncounted. The same phenomenon manifests itself in the (RI|MP)AA announcements of the notional loss due to copyright violations.

Re:

[Bert64]

But you are talking about packaged OSS, a very significant portion of OSS users don't buy packaged software, and it's very hard to quantify the number of people downloading and redistributing.
Many organizations will download one copy, and then use it on several machines too. The OSS model doesn't really fit in with traditional market revenue stats.

so is my bank account

[nguy]

My bank account is also growing exponentially, at 1% interest. That doesn't make me rich any time soon.

Exppnential growth is a meaningless property since many things grow exponentially, many of them quite slowly. What matters is the growth rate and any upper limits to growth.

Re:

[Lehk228]

unless your interest rate is a linear function of your balance, your bank account is growing at a polynomial rate not an exponential rate x^c vs. x^(cx-k)

Re:

[Lehk228]

disregard that. Note to self, avoid math threads while drinking.

Re:

[Sique]

It still grows at an exponential rate because you get also interest on the interest of last year.

Re:

[Lehk228]

i already relized that a few moments after posting.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=487206&cid=22748542 [slashdot.org]

Reminds me of an infinite number of chimpanzees...

[ruinevil]

typing away on an equivalent number of typewriters over their lifetime (~40 years).... at least one of them will have typed the complete works of Shakespeare.

Re:Reminds me of an infinite number of chimpanzees

[bstadil]

Not really. If you all the atoms in the known universe and make chimpanzees out of them and have them type from the start 13.74B years ago until now you would not have 1 sonnet. You wouldn't even need Chimpanzees. You could just claim every book ever written or that ever will be written is already available. Just find them in the Universal library, holding all the permutation of letters and punctuations. If you think the latter is silly you probably should accept the silliness of the former.

Re:

[aproposofwhat]

I know it's conjecture but doesn't pi have all you will ever need somewhere in it?

No simians required (or should that be: we don't need no steenking simians?).

Re:

[Titoxd]

While I get your point, he is actually right [wikipedia.org]. "Infinite" is the key here.

Re:

[bstadil]

It is not that I didn't understand the concept of infinite. The point I was trying to make is that the idea of using infinite to illuminate something anchored in this universe is flawed, if not outright wrong. Another poster made the point that every book ever written or that ever will be written is already embedded in PI, I think that observation elucidates the point equally well. Your rebuttal in not needed as I can just look it up in e.

Re:

[n3tcat]

Or the complete kernel of windows. Chimps fling poo, Microsoft coders fling gooey.

This is terrible news

[eln]

At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Open Source achieves sentience and turns on its creators.

Re:

[Spy der Mann]

At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Open Source achieves sentience and turns on its creators.

Knowing the slashdot crowd, it'll take more than a few curves to do that. Oh, wait...

Re:

[EvilRyry]

turns on its creators

I think that's illegal in most parts of the civilized world.

I've looked at Ohloh...

[adamkennedy]

... and as far as I can tell, most of that growth is all the huge non-modular spaghetti PHP web projects forking endlessly into new varients. I'd like to see that code growth analyzed by unique lines of code or something that factors out all the cut and pasting.

Signal to Noise Ratio

[DaveV1.0]

Ok, so the code base is growing exponentially. Big fucking deal. Last I checked the signal to noise ratio was so high, it was ridiculous. For every decent quality Open Source project, there are thousands of half-assed attempts to reinvent the wheel. And, you all know the projects I am talking about. The finished projects with a three page bug list and a last version that is over two years old because all the developers left after the "sexy" code was written.

Re:

[pembo13]

Please explain how this is not true for non open-source software. I don't see failed projects/programs being at all unique to open-source. At most, it is just more visible.

Signal to Noise Ratio Low not High

[butlerm]

That is a low signal to noise ratio, not a high one.

Re:Is it really a good thing?

[RAMMS+EIN]

Open source is growing. Twenty years ago, virtually nobody had heard about it. Ten years ago, all the cool kids were talking about it, but few people were using it, and companies usually used it in secret. Now, open source is virtually everywhere. All the major players in the computer world are using it and advertising that they are. It's in many home routers. Most organizations I have been to in the past years have at least a Linux box somewhere. The one company I've visited that didn't was a Microsoft shop that developed using the latest Microsoft tools and a bunch of open source libraries. Few people know what open source is, but more and more people have interacted with it in some way.

Linux, Apache, Firefox? The number of people using those is enormous. Perl, PHP, and MySQL are huge, too. And now Java is going open source, which means that a huge part of commercial software development will be done using open source (to the extent that this wasn't true already; think JBoss, Ant, et al.)

Last, but not least, open source is on the desktop. And I don't just mean the odd geek who runs Linux on his desktop. I've already mentioned Firefox, but let's not forget that everybody who uses a Mac uses open source.

Really, open source is all around us.