Open-Source Development Gazes at the Cloud

Posted 01/25/2009 at 9:00am | by David Murphy

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Enterprise business applications still outnumber all other open-source projects, according to a survey of 380 Linux developers by market research firm Evans Data Corporation.  But open-source is on the move away from traditional enterprise infrastructures and into the Cloud--the concept of data being stored "on the Internet" without a single entity or specific server to call home.  Google's App Engine takes top billing as a Cloud provider, with 28 percent of Cloud-ready developers opting to use this service versus 15 percent for Amazon's Elastic Compute.

How does the move work from a business perspective?  Hosting an application in the Cloud allows a developer to cut costs in a dramatic fashion.  Using an internal infrastructure to host an application brings forth high hardware, personnel, and service costs. The external nature of Cloud reduces these, but the caveat is that it's difficult to port an already existing application over to a Cloud platform. These applications are often redesigned from the ground-up to fit the Cloud's scalable architecture.

But where are open-source developers bringing in the cash?  According to Evans Data, more open-source applications are being downloaded through online portals like SourceForge than any other distribution mechanism.  That's not where a significant chunk of the money is coming from, however.  Mobile application stores account make up a large amount of success for developers: 10 percent of wireless projects distributed in this fashion pull in more than $10,000 in revenue, and 70 percent of all projects distributed via mobile application stores make some amount of money.  This is a sharp contrast to open-source applications that are pitched as direct sales to end users.  Of these, only 6 percent of applications make more than $10,000 in revenue. And nearly three-fourths of all applications make no money at all.  Check out the complete stats:

 And here's a breakdown of how open-source programs are organized by genre:

Some other interesting notes from the survey include the fact that 52 percent of all open-source developers use Linux in a virtualized environment.  Almost half of all serious bugs in an open-source project are discovered and fixed within a timeframe of eight business hours.  Only 13.7 percent of these problems take more than 5 business days to fix--We suppose there's some room for catastrophe even in the open-source world.