An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs.

Most Open Source Projects (Not the namesake open source projects) are released under an OSI approved license. The open source definition of OSI states that "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.

Developed by a consortium of European businesses, academics and open source software projects, the new application will analyse the product quality of open source software projects and assess the true potential of the development communities around them.

A census of open source developers has provided a sharp reminder of the necessity of commercially viable open source companies, and also how important it is that commercially viable open source companies employ good people to write open source. This probably isn't news to Reg readers, for whom it might be bleeding obvious - perhaps even tautological.

t seems we’ve arrived upon Microsoft open source. In the last couple of years, whenever there was discussion of Microsoft’s open source projects and efforts such as CodePlex or Port25, there was typically the standard open source response: it’s not OSI-approved; it’s not real open source.

There was a time when open-source software was the domain of computer geeks and do-it-yourselfers with more time than money. But, as Oracle's legal salvo against Google highlighted last week, those days are long gone. Oracle (ORCL), through its purchase of Sun Microsystems, has become one of the largest purveyors of open-source software in the world.

The world biggest Open Source contest, the Le Trophees Du Libre 2007, with over 60,000 Euro in prizes named the winners for each of the categories. The goal of the contest, which is sponsored by the Free SOftware Foundation, Cetril, the EU, IBM and numerous other sponsors, is to promote promising Free Open Source Software.

Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects. So this deal would put Microsoft directly into the open source software business.

If proprietary companies like Oracle can buy up open source projects and then take back their open source status, how can an enterprise depend on open source software?