Economic impact of open source on small business
Here are a few of the findings we derived from Bluehost data (an EIG company) and follow-on research:
- 60% of web hosting usage is by SMBs, 71% if you include non-profits. Only 22% of hosted sites are for personal use.
- WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.
- Languages commonly used by high-tech startups, such as Ruby and Python, have little usage in the SMB hosting market, which is dominated by PHP for server-side scripting and JavaScript for client-side scripting.
- Open source hosting alternatives have at least a 2:1 cost advantage relative to proprietary solutions.
Given that SMBs are widely thought to generate as much as 50% of GDP, the productivity gains to the economy as a whole that can be attributed to open source software are significant. The most important open source programs contributing to this expansion of opportunity for small businesses include Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, and WordPress. The developers of these open source projects and the communities that support them are truly unsung heroes of the economy!
Via Matt Mullenweg.