The Open Source Census, the catch-as-catch-can opt-in attempt to discern trends in open source adoption that OpenLogic started, has collected six months worth of data on some 300,000 installations on about 2,000 machines and from this very narrow and probably unrepresentative slice of life has deduced that government and the financial sector are the biggest users of open source “per machine scanned,” Europe is ahead of the United States, OpenOffice is 3:1 more common on personal PCs than on company machines and that there’s a reasonable amount of open source software being used on Windows.

The only finding that’s gonna turn anybody’s head, especially Microsoft’s, a sponsor of the census, is that last one. The other deductions folks kinda figured out for themselves already.

The census people said, “Participants scanning Windows machines averaged 39 open source software packages per machine scanned. Linux users found more open source, with 87 packages on average, but that also includes open source that is shipped with the Linux distributions. The most popular packages are similar for both Windows and Linux platforms with seven of the top 10 packages in common.”

Microsoft evidently needs to watch its apps flank.

See www.osscensus.org for more details.

Top 20 Open Source Packages
Rank | Package | Installs | Prevalence
1 firefox 2097 83%
2 zlib 1640 65%
3 xerces 1537 61%
4 wget 1511 60%
5 xalan 1457 58%
6 prototype 1421 56%
7 activation 1337 53%
8 javamail 1263 50%
9 openssl 1154 46%
10 openoffice 1146 45%
11 perl 1139 45%
12 docbook-xml 850 45%
13 hsqldb 1135 45%
14 commons-logging 1119 44%
15 ghostscript 1111 44%
16 libxml2 1058 42%
17 vlc 162 41%
18 commons-lang 1025 41%
19 lucene 1023 40%
20 samba 759 40%
Source: The Open Source Census