The impact of open source, grids, and advanced networks

[Elias Sinderson]

Luis Villa wrote:

>Free Software is incredibly international, to a degree the MS-dominated
>commercial software market isn't and won't be. 
>
The latest CACM (Feb 2002) has an article "Who is an open source 
developer?" which reports that 37% of all Linux Software Maps (LSMs), in 
their data set, have authors with European country codes. This, of 
course, is likely an underrepresentation as some of the authors with 
.com and .net suffixes are located in europe as well. It is abundantly 
clear that open source development is supported by a global culture, and 
is is growing. One of the more interesting conclusions in the article is 
that ~75% "of contributors appear as the author of exactly one 
LSM-annotated submission, and only a handful (2.2%) of application 
contributors have contributed five or more submissions." In fact, only 
13 individuals out of 2,429 in the data set have more than 10 submissions.

Food for thought.


    Elias