Open Source Projects for Cloud on Rise, According to Black Duck Software Analysis

Growth in Cloud Infrastructure Enables New Enterprise Application Development

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Aug 23, 2010, 10:10 ET

WALTHAM, Mass., Aug. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Open source projects aimed at enabling enterprise IT application development for cloud computing are proliferating, according to an analysis by Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software.

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Cloud computing frameworks and platforms designed to support integration with cloud services, scalability in private and public clouds, and manage and store cloud data are growing rapidly and include well-known projects such as Hadoop, Eucalyptus, Hyperic, deltaCloud, Open Stack and OpenECP.

"In the wake of the financial crisis of the past 18-24 months and as enterprise IT application developers re-architect applications for cloud environments, they are turning to open source software for its low cost, availability and breadth of possible solutions," said Melinda-Carol Ballou, Program Director, Application Life-Cycle Management & Executive Strategies, IDC. "Open source's low barriers to entry and abundance offer significant time-to-market advantages and make it an emerging and important element of cloud development strategies for enterprise developers. At the same time, organizations must put in effective open source assessment and management capabilities to leverage it as part of a complex software sourcing strategy for the cloud and for other environments."

Black Duck analyzed its KnowledgeBase of open source project information to uncover trends in open source projects for cloud computing. Although many open source projects useful for cloud development and deployment don't specifically reference cloud, Black Duck found almost 400 projects that did. The analysis shows a 70% percent growth from 2008 to 2009 in projects specifically associated with cloud computing. These cloud-specific open source projects account for nearly 50 million lines of code. Cloud environments referenced by the projects show Amazon as the leading environment, followed by Microsoft's Azure, Google Apps Engine, and Force.com. To see a chart and list of OSS cloud projects data referenced in this release, please visit http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/projects/#cloud

"When we began the analysis we expected to find projects focused on security, privacy, and management," said Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President, Black Duck Software. "The variety of projects that self-identify as 'cloud' is much broader in scope, reflecting the sophistication of the cloud application ecosystem and confirming the importance of OSS cloud software developed to support the needs of enterprise IT."

Black Duck spiders the Internet for open source code, collecting information about projects and code into the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which contains information on more than 250,000 open source projects from more than 4,500 unique websites.

To register for a webinar with Black Duck and CollabNet on cloud development, "Using Open Source to Re-Architect Applications for Cloud Deployment," please visit http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/events/2010-08-25

For more information, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

About Black Duck Software

Black Duck Software is the leading provider of products and services for automating the management, governance and secure use of open source software, at enterprise scale, in a multi-source development process. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development costs while mitigating the management, security and compliance challenges associated with open source software. Black Duck Software powers Koders.com, the industry's leading code search engine for open source, and is among the 500 largest software companies in the world, according to Softwaremag.com. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, California, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing. 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.

SOURCE Black Duck Software