Microsoft sponsors Open Source Census, time for cautious optimism

The open source world should be feeling ever more cautiously optimistic with the changing of the Microsoft CEO guard. It has appeared over the past few months that Microsoft has dropped its saber rattling routine and instead joined the brave new world and cooperate with open source. On Monday, the Open Source Census quietly announced that Microsoft has become one of its sponsors. This is a project started earlier this year that aims to discover just how much open source is being used in the wild. The project announced that:

"several organizations have joined The Open Source Census at various levels, including: ActiveState, EnterpriseDB, Microsoft, Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, and OSAlt.com (Open Source as Alternative)."

The official reason Microsoft's Sam Ramji gave for being part of the project was that open source is part of the world Microsoft operates in, which makes it relevant to the proprietary software giant. Ramji has been caught in a difficult position these last few years -- being asked to make Microsoft's products selectively work with open source (Hyper-V with Novell's Linux, for instance). But he has always seemed genuinely interested in guiding his company away from the drama and into cooperation.

Now, the more suspicious among us might be worried that Microsoft's involvement is an attempt to control the outcome. But that's unlikely to be the case here. Microsoft's money isn't likely to have a lot of influence with the crowd in Broomfield, Colo. running this census. Some of them have already been offered Microsoft money (well, jobs) and said no thanks. Fact is, there's money to be had in open source -- in all software, if that software fills a need, works well and is priced right. It is a good sign that the Open Source Census has agreed to cooperate with Microsoft, too. Harmony requires both sides to drop their daggers.

Microsoft, of course, has its own open source licenses out there and there's some possibility that the census will be looking and counting projects that stem from those licenses, too, says Stormy Peters, one of the founders of the Open Source Census. Maybe not right away, as it was unlikely that the census actually launched with any fingerprints to find software written under Microsoft OSI-approved licenses. (Fingerprints are a set of rules that describes an installed open source software project.) However, Peters says, that could change. "We don't break down the list of projects we can find by license. However, anyone can contribute new fingerprints for any open source project. The fingerprints will be validated and tested for accuracy prior to being included in OSS Discovery." Perhaps Microsoft or one of its fans will write such a fingerprint. Would be interesting for Microsoft and the world to know how many of its open source projects are in the wild, too.

The press release also reported some findings of the census so far. With 1,341 machines scanned, 230,091 installations of open source software have been found.

• Ubuntu is the top Linux distribution on machines scanned to date - Various versions of Ubuntu accounted for almost 50% of all Linux distributions installed on participating machines. Debian accounted for 14%; SUSE Linux accounted for 12% of install base; Fedora Core 7%.
• International interest in Census - 66% of machines scanned in the first two months were outside the U.S. U.S. participants represented about one third of participants. Active global participation in the Census came from areas such as Europe, Canada and Australia.
• Top open source packages - The top 5 installed open source packages were in order were, Firefox, Xerces, Zlib, Xalan and Prototype.

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