What is the most popular programming language used by open source developers? The answer depends on how you define popularity. According to a new study from Black Duck, a software-license code analysis vendor, C represents more than 40 percent of all code written for open source software. Black Duck made its determination by counting the actual lines of code.

While it might seem a little of a mundane task, counting the lines of code in your programming projects can be a useful thing to do, and provides you with interesting statistics. Cloc is a Perl script written to allow you to do just that.

Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in? Probably, especially since the code to accomplish that goal was written (and shelved) more than ten years ago. All it takes to make that code available is to ask IBM to release SOM and DSOM as open-source.

A compiler is software that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code).

Welcome to my new ComputerWorldUK blog, where I'll aim to bring you regular dispatches from the front lines of the free and open source software revolution. Starting out with news seems smart, so I'll use this post to announce my new job.

orporations hold a ton of open source code behind their firewalls, and Jim Whitehurst wants to extract it. The Red Hat CEO knows whereof he speaks. Before joining the company he was at Delta Air Lines. In introducing the subject Matt Asay called this code waste. Which gave me a clever idea. Don’t think of these as corporate code contributions. Think of it as code recycling.

Developers get ready for yet another open source language to help make it easier to run code on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern distribution.

If you're active in the open source world, Ohloh probably knows you. The Bellevue, Wash., software company has a database of some 70,000 developers working on nearly 11,000 of the world's major open source projects.