12/12/2007

OpenLogic, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source software solutions encompassing hundreds of open source packages, today announced The Open Source Census, a new collaborative initiative to quantify the global use of open source in enterprises.

ebizQ received the following:

The Open Source Census will be rolled out in several phases over the next six months. The first phase of the program launches today with the release of OSS Discovery under an open source license, as well as an invitation for open source developers, software vendors and large ISVs to join The Open Source Census project. The overarching goal of The Open Source Census is to paint an accurate portrait of open source usage in the enterprise. Today, many enterprises do not know what open source software is installed on desktops and servers – making traditional market research methodologies insufficient to identify what open source projects are gaining traction in the enterprise. Yet the demand for this information is great, as enterprises struggle to sift through thousands of open source projects to determine what might work for them. Using the new OSS Discovery tool, enterprises will be able to scan any of their computers and contribute the scan results back into The Open Source Census database – anonymously and free of charge. Once they have contributed scans, enterprises will have access to reports that summarize their own open source usage and provide comparisons to other similar companies. These reports will enable companies to benchmark their own open source usage and identify opportunities to leverage the benefits of more open source software. All the basic anonymous aggregate data collected through The Open Source Census will be provided for free on a web site. This aggregate data will list the number of times each project has been installed on computers across all participating enterprises. The Open Source Census will be a collaborative initiative. During this initial phase, OpenLogic is recruiting open source communities, vendors and organizations to join The Open Source Census as co-sponsors. Each participating partner will share the goal of quantifying and promoting corporate open source usage. Partners will also have access to the anonymous data gathered by The Open Source Census. “As a contributor, expert and leader in the open source community and to a number of open source projects such as Apache, Perl, sendmail, PHP, GNU and FreeBSD, I can see great value in viewing first hand how enterprises are using open source projects,” said Jim Jagielski, CTO of Covalent Technologies and Chairman of Board of Directors of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). “The Open Source Census could help new projects - as well as established projects - assess corporate interest and uptake of their projects as well as the inherent vitality of their respective communities.” OpenLogic is also releasing today OSS Discovery, an open source software tool that enables enterprises to find installed open source software. A revision of previously released OpenLogic Discovery, OSS Discovery offers a new pluggable architecture that enables community members to contribute their own fingerprint rules to identify open source software packages. OSS Discovery can be used under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. OSS Discovery will be available for download from ossdiscovery.opensource.collab.net, hosted by CollabNet, the company behind popular developer networks and open source community sites such as Sun’s java.net and tigris.org, home of the Subversion open source versioning system. “CollabNet is excited about the potential of what The Open Source Census can accomplish,” said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “Now, enterprises will be able to discover, quantify and learn more about their actual usage of open source. The data will also allow companies to collaborate internally and with open source communities using distributed development infrastructure such as CollabNet to innovate and ensure the success of open source in the enterprise.” The next phase of The Open Source Census will be in the first quarter of 2008, when the project will begin collecting data on open source usage from enterprises.