Black Duck Software Analysis of Open Source Reveals Reuse of Code Representing 316,000 Staff Years

Study of 1,311 of open source projects shows 365,000 instances of reuse

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	Reuse Count
GNU Automake	12,469
Autoconf	6,621
X Free 86	5,925
Foxtrot	5,737
Apache-Jakarta Log4j	5,059
Apache-XML Xerces Java 2	4,960
Jakarta Commons-Logging	4,939
Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE, J2EE)	4,312
Apache Tomcat	4,136
MS VB 2005 Samples	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.

Enterprise software analyst Jay Lyman of The 451 Group observes, “Given economic conditions and the maturation of open source software, enterprise interest in putting it to work wherever possible continues to grow. While organizations are more comfortable with using and reusing open source software within their development and products, they often remain wary of the implications of using open source. Concerns center on security, licenses, version, compatibility and compliance. By bringing together all of this information on open source software in use, Black Duck can provide greater assurance for enterprise open source users.”

To learn more about the Black Duck Suite visit www.blackducksoftware.com. To listen to a podcast on trends and observations coming out of the recent OSBC conference with Black Duck CEO Tim Yeaton, visit: http://ducks.blackducksoftware.com/~webmedia/_Podcasts/BDS-Tim-Yeaton-3-27-09.mp3

About Black Duck Software

Black Duck Software is the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development and maintenance costs while mitigating the risks and challenges associated with open source reuse, including hidden license obligations, security vulnerabilities, unsupported open source and version proliferation. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, as well as distribution partners throughout the world. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

Black Duck, Know Your Code and the Black Duck logo are registered trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Koders is a trademark of Black Duck Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Press Contacts

Peter Vescuso Black Duck Software press@blackducksoftware.com +1 781-891-5100

Ann Dalrymple TopazPartners adalrymple@topazpartners.com +1 781-404-2432