WALTHAM, Mass., March 30, 2009 – An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs. The study conducted by Black Duck Software, a leading provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software (OSS), points to the dramatic efficiencies and cost savings of open source code reuse.
In the review of well-known open source projects, Black Duck examined instances where reusable binary components from one open source project were included in the downloadable release of another project. GNU Automake leads the list of the most-re-used code, appearing as a component of 12,469 other project releases.
To conduct the analysis Black Duck selected 1,311 popular open source projects, a small fraction of the roughly 200,000 open source projects catalogued in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. Projects in the study contained about 491 million total lines of software source code. With an approximate reuse rate of one percent in each of the hundreds of thousands of reuses, developers were able to avoid writing some 1.4 billion lines of source code.
Black Duck spiders the Internet collecting open source and other downloadable code into a repository called the Black Duck KnowledgeBase; a repository of more than 200,000 open source projects with tens of billions of lines of code from over 4,100 unique Internet sites. The Black Duck KnowledgeBase is the largest and fastest-growing repository of open source code in the industry.
The table below lists the top reused open source projects in the Black Duck survey.
Component Name: GNU Automake
Reuse Count: 12,469
Component Name: Autoconf
Reuse Count: 6,621
Component Name: X Free 86
Reuse Count: 5,925
Component Name: Foxtrot
Reuse Count: 5,737
Component Name: Apache-Jakarta Log4j
Reuse Count: 5,059
Component Name: Apache-XML Xerces Java 2
Reuse Count: 4,960
Component Name: Jakarta Commons-Logging
Reuse Count: 4,939
Component Name: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE, J2EE)
Reuse Count: 4,312
Component Name: Apache Tomcat
Reuse Count: 4,136
Component Name: MS VB 2005 Samples
Reuse Count: 4,098
With 2009 software development budgets under severe constraints, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to reuse open source components. However, open source reuse in commercial enterprises has traditionally been stymied by risks and challenges. Black Duck Software provides an enterprise  suite of products which assist development organizations with management , compliance and security of open source code when developers use it in conjunction with other sources of code. (continued...)
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