via Matt Asay

Harvard Business School seems to invest some research-time in the Open Source area, and more specifically in the field of Corporate investments for Open Source projects.

This research first categorized the more than 100’000 projects from SourceForge and eliminated the non-active ones. So, at the end, we are talking about 1’135 projects, which are splitted into categories in this way:

Original file here.

Then, the study is bringing the Corporate investments per category:

Original file here.

It is *impressive* how far the Linux projects are concentrating so many investments… No real differentiation in the investments…

[…] That said, it is useful to have a wide range of investment flowing into a concentration of projects (Linux, Xen, etc.) such that de facto open source standards are created. This frees up investment – proprietary or open source – to innovate elsewhere in the IT stack.

Still, I’d like to see vendors thinking more broadly about their development strategies. Oracle is doing this with its investment in the JSR-170 standard (content repository), perhaps as a counterweight to Microsoft’s SharePoint (proprietary repository). So, it is happening, however limited it may be. I’d just like to see more thought go into investing in Funambol/Sync4j (ensuring that email isn’t locked up by RIM/Blackberry), DimDim (finding clever ways to expand product boundaries with web conferencing), etc.

[…] Too bad very little of it is getting heavy investment.