Aim of this page

This page is intended to gather a maximum of links to studies, press articles about figures of the Free Software economic side. Namely :

• How much money is business around Free Software generating?
• Which percentage of organisations uses Free Software?
• Does Free Software use in the public sector really generate economic activities in the region in question?
• How many Free Software companies are there ?

You can also find the same list sorted by year.

Reported Studies

market share

• Open Forum Europe - "Open Source Software and eGovernment"

  • “By 2012 more than 90% of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded form” (Gartner)

• “The Impact of Free/Libre/Open Source Software on Innovation and Competitiveness of the European Union – UN University MERIT on behalf of the European Commission” 2007

  • Some 50% of organisations already are using OSS in some way
  • Could reach 35% market share of all IT services by 2010.......and 5% of European GDP

web server

• Netcraft yearly Webserver survey

  • November 2005: Apache 70.98%, IIS 20.24% [Netcraft survey of 74,572,794 sites]
  • August 2010 : Apache 56,06% ; Microsoft 25,03%
  • Active Sites: Apache 69.36%, IIS 24.31% [Netcraft]

OS

• Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers! - April 16, 2007 Also available in short in a PDF presentation.

  • GNU/Linux #2 server OS sold 99, 00, 01 (24%, 27%, 25%)

    • Windows : 49.6% ; GNU/Linux : 29.6% ; 2.4% MacOS, NetWare, proprietary IBM OSes

Security

• Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers! - April 16, 2007 Also available in short in a PDF presentation.

  • Browser “unsafe” days in 2004: 98% Internet Explorer, 15% Mozilla/Firefox
  • 50% Windows vulnerabilities are critical, vs. 10% in Red Hat [Nicholas Petreley, Oct 2004]

Reliability

• Fuzz studies found FLOSS applications significantly more reliable [U Wisconsin]
• GNU/Linux vs. Windows NT 10 mo study [ZDNet] : NT crashed every 6 weeks; both GNU/Linuxes, never

Comparison to proprietary software

• Open Forum Europe - "Open Source Software and eGovernment"

  • “Proprietary vendors lose $60 billion to Open Source” (Standish Group)

R & D

• “The Impact of Free/Libre/Open Source Software on Innovation and Competitiveness of the European Union – UN University MERIT on behalf of the European Commission” 2007

  • Firms have already invested €1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software.
  • Potentially saves industry over 36% in software R+D

Miscellaneous

• Open Forum Europe - "Open Source Software and eGovernment"

  • “11% of all new commercial software requirements are satisfied by open source” (Standish Group)