The Open Source Census, an effort to pin down hard statistics regarding the
implementation of open-source software around the world, gets underway on Wednesday.

The census was first announced in December by founder OpenLogic, a vendor of
tools and services for managing open-source software deployments. It has provided
an automated census tool called OSS Discovery under an open-source license for
the project.

Companies and individuals can use the tool to scan their computers for open-source
software and then anonymously upload the data to the
effort's site. The information will be available in two forms. Those who
contribute can get reports summarizing their own use, as well as comparative
data based on similar companies' results. Aggregated data untraceable to any
company will be available publicly on the site.

There is a practical reason for enterprise shops to participate in the effort,
one observer suggested.

"Survey stuff like this -- and OpenLogic isn't the only one talking about
or doing it -- are really examples of Enterprise 2.0 philosophy in action,"
said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk. "Why not pool together
the collective product-use intelligence from all enterprises to help enterprises
make build-buy decisions, instead of relying on vendors, analysts and other
middlemen in the process of doing IT procurement?"

Sample census data provided by OpenLogic showed several ways the numbers could
be crunched. They could list the popularity of various Linux distributions,
chart the countries of respondents, or even list the top 20 open-source packages.

This level of data can be tough to obtain through traditional survey techniques,
said Matthew Lawton, an IDC analyst covering open-source software business models.

IDC targets a range of respondents for its surveys, from CIOs to developers,
but no single person can have "complete visibility over all the open-source
software in an organization," he said. For example, a respondent might
have a good sense of the major open-source projects in use at their company,
but not a full accounting of every small module or pilot project in existence,
Lawton explained.

"This type of census approach, to scan computers and get a complete list
of what has been loaded on those computers, is a fundamentally more sound way
to measure the amount of open-source software," he said.

IDC is among a number of additional project sponsors being announced Wednesday.
Others include CollabNet, the Open Solutions Alliance, the Open Source Business
Foundation and O'Reilly Media.

Apache Foundation Chairman Jim Jagielski and Tony Wasserman, director of the
software management program at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus,
are acting as advisers to the project.

IDG News Service

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