The Open Source Census (OSC) has recently published a report meant to reveal the usage of open source software across the enterprise and across the world. Governments and financial services companies are leading the list, and Europe uses more open source software than all others, including US.
OSC, a collaborative project founded by OpenLogic and sponsored by several companies including IDC, Unisys, and Microsoft, in an effort to quantify the real utilization of open source software in the enterprise, has collected information about open source packages existent on enterprise computers over a period of 6 months. They have found more than 300,000 such packages on over 2,000 machines scanned, enough data to create a reasonably accurate view of the open source utilization in the enterprise.
The key results of the study are, according to OSC:
- Government and financial services companies show the highest use of open source per machine scanned. On average, government agencies have 123 different open source packages installed per machine; financial services companies have 117 different packages installed per machine.
- Europe shows the highest usage of open source, with the United States lagging behind. For example, the U.S. averages 51 open source packages per machine and Europe averages 68 packages per machine.
- There is a significant amount of open source software used on Windows. Participants scanning Windows machines averaged 39 open source software packages per machine scanned. Linux users found more open source, with 87 packages on average, but that also includes open source that is shipped with the Linux distributions. The most popular packages are similar for both Windows and Linux platforms with 7 of the top 10 packages in common.
- OpenOffice has been found on 73 percent of personal machines scanned vs. 28 percent of enterprise machines scanned. The Census will be able to track if this personal use drives increased business use over time.
Entering into details, we find out the following totals:
313,603 - Total Open Source Packages Installed
2,287 - Machines Scanned
768 - Unique Packages Found
57 - Unique Packages Per Enterprise
The Top 10 packages rank as following:
|
Rank |
Package |
Installs |
Prevalence |
|
1 |
firefox |
2178 |
84% |
|
2 |
zlib |
1696 |
65% |
|
3 |
xerces |
1580 |
61% |
|
4 |
wget |
1577 |
61% |
|
5 |
xalan |
1501 |
58% |
|
6 |
prototype |
1472 |
57% |
|
7 |
activation |
1372 |
53% |
|
8 |
javamail |
1298 |
50% |
|
9 |
openssl |
1196 |
46% |
|
10 |
docbook-xml |
887 |
46% |
Top Linux distributions:
Participant Countries:
Industries:
Company Size:
Firefox is the most used open source software across enterprise, while Ubuntu is the most widespread Linux distribution.