WALTHAM, Mass., August 12, 2009, —Black Duck Software, global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today released analysis of data from its KnowledgeBase showing shifts in the growth of programming languages used in open source projects. The analysis, www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/projects#language[...], which looked at language usage, determined by counting lines of source code across all open source projects, shows static programming languages losing share to dynamic languages.

When analyzing project releases from the past 12-months, static programming languages C, C++ and Java are being used less often (-1.8 percentage points of share) in open source projects than dynamic languages JavaScript and PHP (+2.4 percentage points). Also gaining are SQL (up over 1 percentage point) and Ruby (+0.2 percentage point).

Data points drawn from the analysis include:

* 36% of projects with a release in the last 12 months included JavaScript, the most-used and fastest-growing scripting language. More projects overall have used JavaScript than Java by a margin of 3 percentage points.

* 65% of open source code is C, C++, and Java.

* 80% of open source is C, C++, Java, Shell and JavaScript. JavaScript is the only one of these languages gaining in share – up over 2 percentage points in terms of number of lines of code.

* C is the only language that has broken the billion lines-of-code barrier.

“Black Duck’s data is consistent with what IDC is finding on the shift of application development towards web architectures,” said Al Hilwa, Program Director for Application Development Software at IDC. “Languages associated with web applications such as JavaScript and PHP are showing greater growth when compared with traditional languages used for business logic of applications such as Java, C and C++,” Mr. Hilwa continued.

Black Duck Software gathers information by continuously spidering the Internet collecting open source code and binary files into the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, a comprehensive database of open source software and associated license and other information. The KnowledgeBase covers over 200,000 projects collected from over 4,300 code forges and repositories. Black Duck, which has collected information on tens of billions of lines of code, never deletes data and has amassed a significant amount of code that is no longer available from the original hosting sites.

The Black Duck OSS resource center (www.blackducksoftware.com/oss) contains a variety of data about open source projects and licensing. The project page (www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/projects) is dynamically updated with language market share data as code is added to the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. The OSS project page also displays a list of top search terms from Koders.com, Black Duck Software’s free open source code search engine. For more information on the Black Duck OSS Resources Center, visit blackducksoftware.com/oss.