julia ferraioli :cc_by:
Open source folks, I need your help. There's that number, floating around the internet for YEARS now, that claims that ~70% of modern software components are made up of open source software.
I cannot, for the life of me, find the actual source for that. As in, who arrived at that estimation and how.
Can someone please help me track that down or put me in touch with someone who might know?
VM (Vicky) Brasseur
@juliaferraioli Synopsys has been making the claim for years, IIRC, but I don't recall ever seeing methodology for their reports.
VM (Vicky) Brasseur
@juliaferraioli Try this one:
julia ferraioli :cc_by:
@vmbrasseur it predates that one and while the earliest mention does come from a Synopsis study, it doesn't provide any rationale for the estimate.
julia ferraioli :cc_by:
@luis_in_brief @vmbrasseur I really want to know which flavor of bullshit it is so that we can demonstrate why publishing methodology is important
Luis Villa
@juliaferraioli @vmbrasseur FWIW I’ve never seen a concrete methodology. If you’re going by pure package count, the number is almost certainly more like 95-99%; LOC… hard to say, especially since much depends then on whether you’re including “just” libraries or everything from the firmware up.
julia ferraioli :cc_by:
@vmbrasseur that's my suspicion but I want to see if someone can prove it wrong
VM (Vicky) Brasseur
@juliaferraioli I found a 2018 Black Duck report in my files. It includes this line:
“In The Forrester Wave™: Software Composition Analysis, Q1 2017, analyst Amy DeMartine notes that ‘developers use open source components as their foundation, creating applications using only 10% to 20% new code.’”
I’ve emailed you the Black Duck report.
julia ferraioli :cc_by:
@vmbrasseur thanks! Tomorrow I'll go see if *that* methodology is published.
julia ferraioli :cc_by:
@vmbrasseur oh yikes: "This report is available for individual purchase ($2995)."
Benjamin Geer
@juliaferraioli @bookandswordblog Informally, sure, everyone is clearly using a lot of open-source software, but I doubt anyone could get a figure for that. You’d have to ask a lot of companies to give you access to all their code, which they probably wouldn’t want to do, or to do an internal audit for you, which would require a budget so they probably wouldn’t want to do that either.
julia ferraioli :cc_by:
@benjamingeer @bookandswordblog presenting stats without sources as fact isn't cool though, even if getting the sources is hard.
Benjamin Geer
@juliaferraioli @bookandswordblog It’s unfortunate that many people feel that they need a number to be persuasive or to get attention, when a qualitative assessment would be fine.
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