Open Source Census Reveals More Than 275,000 Open Source Installations Worldwide

The Open Source Census, a global project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, has identified more than 275,000 open source installations on over 2,000 machines. The most popular open source projects include Firefox, Zlib, Xerces, Xalan, and Wget. Ruby, PHP, Python, Hsqldb, MySQL, and Postgres are also commonly used. The Open Source Census found that more than half of the open source software was installed on Windows machines and that Ubuntu and Debian are the most popular Linux distributions among participants with Linux machines. The project also found data that contradicts common held ideas regarding the popularity of various open source projects, such as Ruby being more common than Perl and Hsqldb being the most common database.