Latest findings of the CAOS Report 2008

No, this is not a new version of the CHAOS Report of the Standish Group which reports about how many IT projects failed in the last year again. This is about a report concerning the Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) which the 451 group created last year and which Matt Aslett introduced us yesterday at the Eclipse Annual Member Meeting.

Hmm, if one only looked at the number of attendees, it seems that the Eclipse community is getting smaller, as only about 40 people attended the member meeting. But this is probably due to several really interesting tutorials that were part of EclipseCon and that happened at the same time. All in all there are about 1,000 people here at EclipseCon, so the community is much bigger!

So what did the CAOS report contain? The title of the presentation was "Open Source is not a business model". And as Matt finished, "Open Source is a business tactics, not a business model".
They had a look at 114 companies and investigated their business strategies. These were categorized in 4 categories:
- license choice
- development model
- vendor licensing strategy
- reveneue trigger.

Already the first category, the license choice, offered some quite interesting insights: most of these companies (51,8%!) use the GPLv2. All in all the usage of GPL and LGPL covered 72,8 % of all companies. The Eclipse Public License (EPL) for example is only used by 6,1 %! With probably hundreds of different open source licenses around, only 10 are mainly used!

Interesting was also the revenue triggers: many companies probably started their open source strategy with offering service and support for money. In the meanwhile this is only 7,9 % of how revenue is achieved. Mostly these companies make money by subscriptions(34,2%) and commercial licenses (24,6%).

There were a lot of more interesting things that were mentioned, but I guess this short summary shows already that this report might be interesting for you!

Oh yes, as we already have a look at different numbers, I might add some more statistics that different people from the Eclipse Foundation explained at the Annual Member Meeting: the Eclipse Foundation currently has 172 members and 901 different committers from at least 75 organizations! Wow, that's not bad!
There are approximatelly 1 million downloads each month of the different Eclipse releases whereas 26% of all downloads come from China! A huge number! Of all downloads 34% were the IDE for JEE and 22% the IDE for Java. So, Eclipse is still mostly important for developing Java.
But this will change in the future as the planning for Eclipse version 4.0 (Codename: e4) is already in an advanced state.

Oh, yes, some last numbers: when looking at the European region of Eclipse Germany is with 44% still in front, after that comes France with 16% and Sweden with 8%. As the committers of our JWT project mostly come from Germany and France, this meets perfectly our profile *g*.