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Where does open source code come from?
January 12, 2007

The European Commission has published its final report on the Economic Impact of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector.

Weighing in at 287 pages it will take some time to digest, and contains enough data and statistics to fill a blog for a whole year. During a first glance through the report my eye was drawn to a couple of things in particular, however:

- "The high share of European FLOSS developers provides a unique opportunity to create new software businesses and reach towards the Lisbon goals of making Europe the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010." (More on this at a later date.)

- "Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is made freely available. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue."

Expanding on the latter, the report has some interesting statistics about who is responsible for open source code.

According to the study, at the end of 2005, 61.2% of code had been developed by individuals, according to copyright and credit claims, while 19.2% was claimed my companies, 5.6% universities, and 7.9% foundations.

If the figure attached to individuals seems high, a clue perhaps lies in the phrase "copyright and credit claims". Where a company is not claiming copyright, the individual developer is more likely to claim credit, perhaps.

The study also backs up Sun Microsystems’ claim to be the biggest donator of open source code. The top ten business contributors were as follows:

1 Sun Microsystems
51,372 Person-months
312m euros

2 IBM
14,865 Person-months
90m euros

3 Red Hat
9,748 Person-months
59m euros

4 Silicon Graphics
7,736 Person-months
47m euros

5 SAP
7,493 Person-months
46m euros

6 MySQL
5,747 Person-months
35m euros

7 Netscape
5,249 Person-months
32m euros

8 Ximian
4,985 Person-months
30m euros

9 Realnetworks
4,412 Person-months
27m euros

10 AT&T
4,286 Person-months
26m euros

Overall it is estimated that 986 different businesses have contributed 31.2 million lines of source code, representing 16,444 person years at an estimated cost of 1.2bn euros.

Meanwhile the top ten academic institutions were as follows:

1 Regents Of The University Of California
4,955 Person-months

2 Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
4,774 Person-months

3 Carnegie Mellon University
1,687 Person-months

4 University Of Chicago
1,340 Person-months

5 INRIA
1,009 Person-months

6 University Of Amsterdam
982 Person-months

7 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum Amsterdam
870 Person-months

8 Ohio State University
551 Person-months

9 University Of Utah
518 Person-months

10 University Of Notre Dame
505 Person-months

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Posted by Matthew Aslett on January 12, 2007 04:33 PM

« How do enterprises acquire open source software? | Main | Europe's great open source opportunity »

Comments

how do people get paid if they give away the software?

Posted by: Jay on March 18, 2007 10:11 AM

By adopting one of a number of support or product business models. Click on my name above to go to a post about the variety of models.

Posted by: Matthew Aslett on March 18, 2007 12:10 PM

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Where does open source code come from?January 12, 2007

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Where does open source code come from?
January 12, 2007