Let the world know how much OSS you are using with The Open Source Census - Adventures in Switching to Linux

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Let the world know how much OSS you are using with The Open Source Census

I just read today about The Open Source Census. It is a project aimed to get a better understanding of what and how much Open Source software is being used in a business setting. From their about page:

The primary goal of The Open Source Census is to promote the use of more open source software in the enterprise. We know that if we can show companies how much open source they and their peers are already using, they will feel comfortable using even more.
I've already submitted 3 systems (a Linux server (CentOS 3), Linux desktop (Ubuntu 7.10) and Windows XP desktop). All you have to do is download their scanning tool (it is about 45MB assuming you are without Java and Ruby), get a submission key and run it on your system. It took anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours for each of the 3 systems I ran it on today to finish the analysis.


From their results so far (there are only 619 unique systems at this point), 81% of people have zlib (a de/compression library), 80% have Firefox and 75% have xerces (Apache XML parser for Java). Those are the top 3.

So help out by running the scanner on your machines.

Want are others saying?
And other similar projects/ideas:
  • Smolt - A hardware tracking project mostly used by Fedora. It is supported on other platforms though. I have not tried it myself. Check out the results.
  • Ubuntu application popularity - You can enable sending what you have installed to Ubuntu to keep track of the most popular applications. That is how they know how many stars to show under Add/Remove Applications.
  • Most popular Linux distributions by page hit over at DistroWatch

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