Measuring FLOSS using Google Trends

I have to give Stephen O'Grady all the credit; using Google Trends to obtain a barometer reading of the state of FLOSS is brilliant. It's not a perfect barometer, but one of the most accessible. In my research this confirms my general feeling that interest in FLOSS and free culture is losing the mindshare.

In this analysis "The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline?"  Steve used Google Trends with a few popular projects and keyword phrases, and shared the results. Frankly, there is nothing surprising.

There were two main conclusions: (a) mature projects are trending downward; (b) while newly created projects and new markets are growing very quickly.

The Google Trend for Apache shows a clear downward trend. This trend is seen in Linux, open source, MySQL, gpl, and PHP. While the trends are similar they are numerous theories for the why they're going down. Like Steve, I'll stay away from the why, there's an infinite reasons why (or why not).

However, when it came to exploding markets, then FLOSS is clearly the dominant technology. For example, Hadoop is nearly unchallenged by any major software maker. This exploding demand trend is also seen in other emerging markets, including: nosql, linux cloud, & notably, android(*). * There is debate raging just "how much" of Android is FLOSS, but at least the kernel is Linux.

Analysis

In general the state of open source is mixed. Some good, some, not so good.  Is this a credible measure?  Only more time will tell.

One thing Steve's research helped me do, was to recall Google's roots; measuring academic references is what lead Google to search. So maybe there was a another way to measure the statue of open source using search. I recently spent sometime with Google Scholar, and I'm happy to report that it does provide a fairly accurate way to produce another measurement. The number of academic papers about open source by year, since 1998. In addition, using the same technique, I was able to generate the number of academic papers about free software by year since 1985.  We'll jump into those findings in the next post; for now they're in the version 0.2 of the Financing Freedom slides.