Market for Open Source J2EE?

[doombreed]

Hey all

Does anyone actually know how large the market for Open Source J2EE really is? How many companies utilize it etc? I'm after this info for a paer im writing. Thanks in advance all.

[joe2]

It depends on how you want to define the space. If you are looking for just full-featured J2EE application servers, then JBoss is far and away the dominant product in terms of downloads, user base, etc... If it helps, JBoss Application Server averages about 200,000 downloads per month. Because of the open source nature, we don't require registration information and don't really have great visibility into how many individual companies that relates to.

There was a survey done by BZ Research (for SD Times) late last year. It showed that 26.9% of enterprises now use JBoss (2003 figures, up from 13.9% in 2002). If you go to the news section on this site you'll see a link to a JBoss press release about it. The release has more details.

If you're using a broader definition of J2EE, then the usage of open source is much larger. Tomcat, for example, is a servlet engine and enjoys incredible popularity in the market place. I would guess that Tomcat is downloaded even more on a monthly basis than JBoss although I don't have data to back that up.

There are also a lot of other very popular J2EE open source products - Hibernate for example. So again, it all depends on what you're trying to find out.

If you question is as simple as: how many enterprises use any open source Java/J2EE products? then you may want to check for an analyst report on that subject. They are the most likely to conduct this type of study. I believe Forrester recently released a study on open source penetration in general. If this is of interest, feel free to ping me directly ([e-mail]) and I can try to dig it up for you. I'm not allowed to send you the report direclty but I can pull out relevant figures for you.

- Joe McGonnell, JBoss