Black Duck Software has released a study that analyses the way more than 1,300 open source project codes were used by the global software developer community and discovered that these codes were recycled into other projects more than 365,000 times.
The estimated reuse of these saved more than 316,000 staff years, which in turn translates to tens of billions of dollars in development cost savings.
The reuse of codes and savings could have been significantly more had many companies not been sceptical about open source usage for the entire product life cycle, according to the company. But now with the ongoing recession still rampant and showing little signs of letting up they may be eventually forced to completely engage in open code usage.
"Given economic conditions and the maturation of open source software, enterprise interest in putting it to work wherever possible continues to grow,” said Jay Lyman, Enterprise Software Analyst of
The 451 Group. “While organizations are more comfortable with using and reusing open source software within their development and products, they often remain wary of the implications of using open source.”
The study indicates that open source code reuse makes solutions leaner, more agile and significantly cheaper. While more than 200,000 open source projects are listed and reside in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase repository, it chose only the most popular codes to assess and found that between them they accounted for nearly 490 million lines of code that when reused saved developers from writing additionally almost 1.4 billion lines.
It found that GNU Automake’s reusable binary code appeared as a wheel within a wheel almost 12,500 times in other projects’ downloadable releases. Some other popular codes used similarly were Autoconf - 6,621times, X Free 86 - 5,925 times, Foxtrot - 5,737 times, and Apache-Jakarta Log4j - 5,059times. Such stats should allegedly go a long way in allaying fears about total open source code usage and recycling.
“Concerns center on security, licenses, version, compatibility and compliance,” said Lyman. “By bringing together all of this information on open source software in use, Black Duck can provide greater assurance for enterprise open source users."
Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Tim Gray
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