Census Reveals the Top 20 Open Source Packages
The other day we reported findings from the Open Source Census--a global effort to track the number of installations of open source packages on computers. Among the top-level findings were that open source is seeing broad adoption in Europe and in finance. The census has also made available a list of the top 20 open source packages found in its scans of thousands of computers. Here are the packages that made the top 20 list.
Not surprisingly, Mozilla's Firefox browser is more prevalent on scanned machines--found on 83 percent of them--than anything else. Some of the other packages on the list are obviously there because they arrive automatically under the hood of operating systems. It is interesting to see Lucene, the open source search engine with a truly remarkable indexer make the list.
Here are the top 20 packages, ranked by prevalence on machines around the globe, and you can find more at the Open Source Census site:
| Top 20 Open Source Packages | ||
|---|---|---|
| Rank | Package | Prevalence |
| 1 | Firefox | 83% |
| 2 | zlip | 65 |
| 3 | Xerces | 61 |
| 4 | wget | 60 |
| 5 | Xalan | 58 |
| 6 | Prototype | 56 |
| 7 | Activation | 53 |
| 8 | JavaMail | 50 |
| 9 | OpenSSL | 46 |
| 10 | OpenOffice | 45 |
| 11 | Perl | 45 |
| 12 | Docbook-XML | 45 |
| 13 | HSQLDB | 45 |
| 14 | Commons-Logging | 44 |
| 15 | GhostScript | 44 |
| 16 | libxml2 | 42 |
| 17 | VLC | 41 |
| 18 | Commons-Lang | 41 |
| 19 | Lucene | 41 |
| 20 | Samba | 40 |