When I joined OpenLogic 3 years ago, I wondered if enterprises would eventually standardize on a limited set of open source packages, thereby reducing the diversity of open source projects they use.

Well the verdict is in, and to-date we've seen that enterprises are using more and more open source software. They are expanding both the number of open source packages they use, as well as the number of places open source is deployed.

Because of this growth in open source usage, in 2008 we doubled the size of our certified library on OLEX to include 500 open source projects. These packages have passed our 42-point certification process to ensure that they are appropriate for enterprise use. The list of certified open source packages continues to grow based on market adoption and requests from our customers.

As our enterprise customers continue to expand their use of open source, they also wanted to give their developers the ability to research and evaluate a wide variety of open source packages. And they wanted to be able to govern and manage all of the open source in use within an organization — whether OpenLogic-certified or not.

So we've responded by expanding OLEX to include 130,000 open source projects, in addition to the 500 certified projects. This allows developers to research and evaluate from a wide range of open source projects, while ensuring that corporate policies and governance controls remain in place. In addition, if enterprises identify a package that they want to use which has not yet been certified, they can make a request for OpenLogic to put it through the certification process.

At OpenLogic, we've found that once enterprises have put in place some basic controls for managing and governing open source, their use of open source tends to expand even more. After working with enterprises over the last three years, I've now seen the evidence that the explosion of open source in the enterprise will continue.

Today’s NYT has an article in its Business Computing section on R the open source data analysis language that’s starting to put a dent in SAS. Read the SAS spokeperson’s comments – looks like a case of open source denial in full bloom.

Secondly, a new book on Gnuplot is available for pre-release in PDF from Manning – Gnuplot in Action. I would highly recommend the book even though it’s not in final form and you have to buy the PDF from Manning directly. It’s basically complete and very usable – tons of good examples in it – and I first learned of R from this book’s mention of it.

I used Gnuplot extensively recently when I built test software for a wifi RF signal strength vs distance/terrain field study I did for a major construction equipment manufacturer. After getting into it, I wanted to write a blog entry called “Oldies but Goodies” and Gnuplot was going to be on the list.

Gnuplot has been around for a long time, and considering its maturity has continued to keep boundaries on itself so it’s not trying to be all things to all people. It’s not trying to be an R, for example. It’s a mark of a good OSS project when it can maintain that type of discipline.

FYI – here’s a quick glimpse of a Gnuplot that came from my wifi field study. Nothing fancy, but just nice, clean charts.

The beauty of using Gnuplot is how scriptable it is and how many output formats it can support…everything from ASCII art, to all the major bitmap graphic formats, to SVG, PS and PDF. I used Ruby to drive Gnuplot results for dozens of charts of different RF experiments done for that study. All the charts where generated by Gnuplot into PDF format so I could scale them easily. They could then be sucked into Mac Pages to build a very professional looking report. As PDFs, every chart was scalable once in the page layout program, so it was a perfect output format and could be quickly generated. As data changed during the experiments, I regenerated dozens of resulting charts effortlessly.

Gnuplot was a wonderful tool for RF data analysis and a reminder that not everything that’s great has to be hot and new.

[update: found this presentation on using Gnuplot and R together]

About me

I’m an independent consultant who used to do a lot of work for OpenLogic. I greatly appreciate OpenLogic and the mission they are fulfilling as well as their willingness to let me contribute to this blog. Views expressed here are not necessarily those of OpenLogic and any mistakes are 100% attributable to me. You can contact me at: landon at 360vl dot com or visit http://sawdust.see-do.org