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Open-Source Development Gazes at the Cloud

David Murphy — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:00:00 -0600

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.

Is The Open Source Business Model Broken?

Justin Kerr — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:07:42 -0600

Respected Open Source advocate, and CEO of Collaborative Software Stuart Cohen warns that the business model behind open source software companies is broken. And that the nature of these businesses will need to evolve in order to survive. In his article he explains how the traditional model in which companies would freely offer software, and make a living off the support is coming to an end. An end which is likely to be accelerated by the economic slowdown. He cautions open source designers to view the software as more of a means to an end.

As part of his argument, he claims the real value of open source software companies will come from those who can find ways to add value with supporting add-ons and applications. He uses Red Hat as an example of a company that adds significant value to the Linux kernel, and couldn’t survive on support alone. “Open-Soure code is generally great code, not requiring much support”. According to Cohen the true power of the open source community will be realized through the spirit of collaboration. “While the open-source business model may be broken, the concepts behind open source will continue to bring new value to customers and strong returns to software company stakeholders”.

So do you think the harsh economic climate will hurt or inspire the open source community?

As Promised, Google Releases Android Code as Open Source for Tinkering

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:27:07 -0500

Coders, start your engines. The long awaited release of the Android source code has come to an end, thanks to the Android Open Source Project. The announcement, which was made just yesterday, hopes to potentially influence the future of mobile devices as a whole. Pretty ambitious!

“Even if you're not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer,” writes Dave Bort (are they out of license plates in the gift shop?) on Androiod’s blog, “Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I've ever worked with.” He continues to encourage anyone with a great idea for a new feature to simply add it. Given the nature of the open source project, anyone can influence Android.

Some big ups have to go out to Google on this one, making Andrioid perhaps one of the easiest development tools to acquire. Considering it’s free to license and now the entire source code is available to anyone that wants it, perhaps their dream of world domination is only a few developers away.

Image Credit: Google