[ossig] Linux grabs 75% of all open source investment

[Ditesh Kumar]

Interesting to see that among dev platforms, PHP, Java and TCL are
getting monetary investments.

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From
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news_print.asp?guid=A1B32198-A313-404B-915C-0CC122E33D92
Linux grabs 75% of all open source investment
5th December 2006
By Staff Writer
The Linux operating system is the recipient of 75% of all vendor
investment in open source software, according to a new report from the
Harvard Business School, which also indicates that vendor support for
open source is primarily motivated by boosting their proprietary
offerings.
The preliminary draft report suggests that $2bn was invested by vendors
in open source software between 1995 and 2005, with $1.5bn plowed into
Linux, $317m into the Firefox browser, $76m into the OpenOffice.org
productivity suite and $48m into the MySQL database.

The only other projects to receive significant vendor backing, according
to the study, were the PHP scripting language with $24m, the Tcl
scripting language with $15m, and the JBoss middleware stack with $10m.

Although numerous investments since 2005 would change the picture, and
the Eclipse tools project appears to be a notable omission, the research
indicates that the vast majority of vendor investment in open source has
been placed in Linux, and that vendors are clearly looking for a return
on their investments.

"If vendors were altruistically motivated to contribute to OSS projects,
we would expect to see an even distribution of investments across
projects," noted the reports authors: Marco Iansiti, professor of
business administration at the Harvard Business School, and Gregory
Richards, managing director of Keystone Strategy Inc.

Their research indicates that most investments in open source software
are driven by economic motives and are complementary to proprietary
software, hardware and service portfolios, something that many industry
watchers would have predicted to be the case.

To calculate the investment levels, the researchers looked at direct
financial contributions and venture capital funding, as well as putting
a value on developer hours for ongoing development and contributed code.
Customer contributions, volunteer time, and investments from individuals
and non-profit organizations were excluded.

The report also suggests a new metric for assessing the impact of an
open source project by multiplying weekly distributions by the size of
the installation file (representing problem complexity) to calculate the
installation rate. Linux had an installation rate of 204 terabytes per
week, OpenOffice.org 27, MySQL 15, Firefox 12, and JBoss 3.