Number crunching

Demand for Microsoft Silverlight remains sluggish

Microsoft has been making a big push to own the web with Silverlight, but six months into the experiment, few are signing up to help with the coup d'etat. Sure, Microsoft is seeing plenty of downloads (1.5 million per day, in fact, though this may have to do more with Microsoft games than real demand)Computerworld scanned the job boards and printed book titles to gauge Silverlight demand and found it a distant also-ran to Adobe's Flash:

[T]he ratio of jobs mentioning Flash or Silverlight heavily favored the former. Ratios ranged from a high of 67:1 in favor of Flash at Careerbuilder.com to a still weighty 24:1 at Dice.com. All told, averaging ratios from the nine sites found programming jobs requiring Flash skills to be 41 times more plentiful than ones asking for Silverlight.

Silverlight is new and so it's to be expected that it will take time to find publishers and employers who need in-house expertise. Even so, if developers were actively interested in it they would be searching for more information on it. They're not, as this Google Trends report shows:… Read more

Linux clocks double-digit growth. Fear and loathing in Redmond

IDC is reporting that Windows server growth hit 6.9 percent in Q4 2007, bringing it to 36.6 percent market share. Linux trounced Windows' growth at 11.6 percent to hit 12.7 percent market share. Microsoft owns the market, but Linux owns the future.

Therein lies the rub of the tale behind much of Microsoft's fear and loathing of open source.

As Jim Zemlin suggests, developers want to write software to a winning platform. Microsoft's Windows has long been an easy choice, but with the rampant growth of Linux, Linux is becoming an easy choice for developers, too. Given Steve Ballmer's sweaty passion for developers, this has got to be causing consternation in Redmond.

So what does Microsoft do about it?… Read more

The problem with open-source surveys

Esther Schindler at CIO.com noticed that open-source databases made a poor showing in a recent Evans Data survey. When she asked Evans Data's founder about it, however, he noted that the problem is not in the databases. The problem (with the survey results) is that open-source developers are more critical of their work than, say, Microsoft administrators:

...[W]hen you pay someone else to supply a box of shrink-wrapped software, you're emotionally distant from it. You may rant about its inadequacies, but you're essentially powerless to change them, and you have no expectation that your personal opinion will affect the product's evolution.… Read more

C# set to take Java's crown as Java drops 50 percent

Using book sales as surrogate tea leaves, Mike Hendrickson of the O'Reilly Radar finds life bleak for pretty much every major programming language except C#, Javascript, and Ruby. Java? It has plunged by 50 percent since 2003.

Sun Microsystems is hedging its bets on web scripting languages, recently adding Python experts to its fold. So perhaps Sun will weather the storm. Regardless, even despite its five-year slide, Java still holds the biggest share of the book-buying market, as this chart shows:… Read more

$30.4 billion, not $11.4 billion, in software patent damage to the economy

End Software Patents earlier claimed that the US economy suffers an $11 billion hit each year due to needless software patents. It turns out that End Software Patents was wrong.

The number is actually $30.4 billion.

What's $20 billion between friends? The group revised upward its earlier, more conservative estimates based on the following [PDF]:

The U.S. Courts reported 2,830 patent lawsuits (of all kinds) filed in FY2006. Bessen and Meurer estimate that as of 2002, 25% of patent infringement suits are over software; all signs indicate that the current number is much higher, but we … Read more

Novell reports improved earnings on Linux momentum

At some point, Novell is going to look at its quarterly numbers and realize that open source is its biggest bright spot, and its old businesses like Workgroup are dying on the vine. With 65 percent year over year growth in its Linux business, Novell might actually become a true open-source company yet...as Linux grows and other product lines die.

It was a solid quarter for Novell, which swung to a profit, and looks to be a great year as the company has revised upwards its guidance for the year: Net revenue is expected to be between $940 million and $970 million, exceeding previously stated guidance of between $920 million and $945 million.

But it's the Linux business that is Novell's best performer:… Read more

$11.4 billion wasted on software patent litigation...and counting

$11.4 billion is wasted each year on software patent litigation, according to the End Software Patents coalition. How did it get to the $11.4 billion figure?

Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation estimates that 55 software patent suits are filed every week. The American Intellectual Property Lawyer's Association states that a single mid-sized patent suit costs $4 million to litigate.

That's a lot of billable hours. However, it's perhaps not surprising given that patent swine like Global Holdings illegitimately attempt to extort patent royalties from unsuspecting enterprises:… Read more

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: Who has the best community?

Maybe there's still some fight in the PostgreSQL competition, after all. [Update: Or maybe it has more to do with internal changes at MySQL - see below.] According to data compiled by MarkMail, PostgreSQL messaging traffic dwarfs that of MySQL's, suggesting that the Postgres community is more active than MySQL's:

Comparing PostgreSQL and MySQL is kind of interesting. With all the talk about the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-Perl-Python) architecture you'd think MySQL had a lock on the open source database market, but based on simple message traffic analytics, PostgreSQL has a much higher level of community involvement. Looking at January 2000 onward, the MySQL lists have amassed 340,000 messages with about 3,000 new messages each month. In the same time period, the PostgreSQL lists have hit 583,000 messages with 7,000 new each month.

I'm surprised. A (highly imperfect) Google Trends analysis shows MySQL (blue) dwarfing PostgreSQL (red) in terms of search interest (but both are on the decline):… Read more

Open source and the future of vendor-free IT

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength.

The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

Matt writes:

The shocking result here is the complete dearth of service providers that are currently being tapped for installation, training, and other services associated with open source software, regardless of where in the software stack that software sits. Less than 1% of the projects have attendant services sourced from service providers.… Read more