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Massachusetts-based Black Duck Software says open source development is much more prevalent and productive than most people think.

"There are tens of billions of lines of open source code available on the Internet, Black Duck says, and 23 percent of all downloadable code was released or renewed in 2008," writes TMCnet's Michael Dinan.

What's more, according to a company statement, "The open source world is dominated by components, not fully formed applications, and these are being reused from project to project in hundreds and even thousands of instances. One example, Apache Log4j, is reused by over 5,500 projects. Java developers, in particular, have taken tremendous advantage of code reuse. There are 14 times more files distributed ending in the .class file suffix (binaries) than .java (source files). A major reason is that Java components are built once and reused and redistributed by many other projects in binary form..."

More here from Heise Online ... more here from OStatic ... and the press release is here.