Where can I find statistics about open source software?

September 3, 2007 2:29 AM

Where can I find comparisons of the time it takes for an application to become relatively mature (in feature set, and bugs) in comparison to its status as open or closed source?
posted by jackofsaxons to computers & internet (4 comments total)

There's probably just too much leeway in that question to answer it usefully, so for what it's worth here are some random thoughts:

Copying an existing implementation (MS Office/OpenOffice, Photoshop/GIMP) is a lot easier than building something from scratch.

You have to decide when something is feature-complete (IIS/Apache, Windows/Linux - these are all basically "done" and have been for some time, but releases still happen - where are you going to draw the line?)

IE/Mozilla is a particularly horrible comparison - IE has a vast amount of resources poured into it, while Mozilla had the Netscape codebase to build on.

A lot of OSS developers are funded by companies (*cough*IBM*cough*) who want to cut the legs out from under MS. The whole "developers donating their time for free" thing is a bit of a PR lie, and the models don't differ as much as you think).
posted by Leon at 5:19 AM on September 3, 2007

The question is too broad to answer, or even to begin to generalize about.

Some areas are dominated by closed-source (eg drafting), some are mostly open-source (Web servers and frameworks), and in many areas there are contenders from both camps.

And things are just changing too fast for any answer to remain valid for long. Sorry...
posted by Artful Codger at 11:28 AM on September 3, 2007

It is a fairly broad question, but I've found that doing a Google advanced search for a particular phrase or term, and restricting the file type to PDFs, is a good way of bringing up statistical documents. Not sure if that would work in this case, though.
posted by lindsey.nicole at 1:58 PM on September 3, 2007

Joel on Software says it takes 10 years to write good software.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html

His examples are right on, and his point seems to apply to open and closed source projects equally.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:11 PM on September 3, 2007