The estimate was created using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), first released in 1981.

Black Duck, which originally developed its database of code to help companies comply with software licenses, is increasingly turning to it as a research tool, a sort of Framingham Heart Study of software.

In the last few months, for instance, it has documented the rising use of Javascript and PHP, the return of the software M&A market, and the increased use of strong encryption in open source, using its data.

“We’re trying to package up the information around open source projects and serve it in a way that’s productive,” acknowledged Peter Vescuso, (above, right) executive director of business marketing.

Increased interest in and use of open source by enterprises has helped drive excellent growth for the company over the last year, said CEO Tim Yeaton (left). “When the recession started, even conservative organizations have moved to open source.” Studies like this one are a way of giving back.

While three of five developers are still .Net centric, Yeaton added. “What we’re seeing is a wave of pragmatism in terms of building solutions. The religion is out of the equation. Once people figure it out it’s going to be a better way to build” they use it.

“Vendors serving customers at the application development level are figuring out how to respond more effectively. Our message seems to resonate. It’s about the pragmatism of taking advantage of what’s out there, and making good choices at the application level.

“Choose what’s right for the job.” It’s not about values, it’s about value.

UPDATE: Mr. Vescuso made some great points in our talkback thread I think should be in the main story.

it may not be clear this analysis is based on a sample of Black Duck customers and does not represent all enterprise or commercial applications. Our description is at:
http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-11-10

These were all large code bases. The 22% of the application/product code represents over a half million lines of finished code. If you use COCOMO and BLS wage estimates, you get $26 million. This is the same model and approach the Linux Foundation used to estimate what it would cost to develop Linux. Whatever method you use, a half millions lines of finished code — written, tested — is significant.

When a program is proprietary, it’s yours. You own it. You can feed it or you can kill it.

Not so with open source. When software is made open source it is with the knowledge that its fate is shared among all stakeholders. The contributions that make it valuable may well come from outside, the direction of the software is no longer completely in the hands of its owner or sponsor.

Larry Ellison doesn’t understand this, and I suspect neither does Wall Street. Otherwise, why would the Street be cheering on Ellison’s suggestion that he’ll kill Sun to keep Euro-hands off mySQL?

More than the future of mySQL is now on the line. So are the futures of Java and OpenOffice, and all the other projects Sun Microsystems sponsors. Ellison thinks this fact should make the EC Competition Commissioner, Nellie Kroess, back off. He seems to think the U.S. government can make Kroess relent.

The key to why Ellison is wrong can be found in the paragraph above. It’s one word. I’ll wait…

The word is sponsors.

Open source companies don’t own the code bases that are in their charge. They seek to monetize the code, so the code can be expanded, so it will draw more committers. Acquia doesn’t own Drupal, and Automattic doesn’t own Wordpress. The code bases are, in fact, owned by the community, simply by virtue of being open source.

Ellison seems to think that if he snaps his fingers and brings down the wrath of heaven, then mySQL and Java and OpenOffice will cease to exist. This would be true if they were closed source. In that case they would be orphaned, and if no buyer were found support would disappear.

Open source does not work that way.

Sure it would be tough for these big projects to find new sponsors. But there are plenty of prospects around.

Google would have an interest in Java, as might Microsoft. IBM already has a stake in Open Office. I’m certain we can find another home for mySQL, too. Even Glassfish might well find a new home within the federal government.

Ellison’s threat to kill Sun’s open source projects if he does not get his way is an empty one. Someone would pick up what remaining pieces have value.

Open source, divorced from its sponsor, turns to software water, and would quickly flow through Ellison’s hands.

Go to an open source conference. Listen carefully to the commercial open source businesspeople you see there. They may talk about their kids and their companies, their hobbies and their passions, including a passion for the projects they control.

But they know those projects are more like their kids than their sailboats. They are responsible for the software they control. They do not own it. It’s not “my” software. It’s “our” software.

This is the attitude you must take if you’re to make a success of an open source business. This is why many in the proprietary world, like Larry Ellison, confuse it with communism, or socialism, or some other foreign -ism.

Open source be not proud. Open source code responds to whomever gives it the love of time. The parents aren’t those who gave it the DNA of capital, but those who gave it the love of hard work.

There is irony here, because the bulk of Mozilla’s income comes from Google, in the form of royalties on the Google search box which sits on the upper-right corner of the program’s interface.

Thus we have a browser created to stop the Microsoft monopoly pushing what some say is the next dangerous monopoly, that of Google.

Firefox is not Mozilla’s only project. There is the Thunderbird e-mail client, the Bugzilla bug tracking system, and SeaMonkey, which combines Firefox and Thunderbird with Web development tools and chat.

But Firefox is what Mozilla is known for, and most of its work, and that of its add-on makers, is devoted to Firefox and the technologies that emerged from it.

Firefox has transformed the Web, by creating real competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The question to ask today, however, is where does Mozilla go from here?

• Can Mozilla expand its funding sources to become truly independent of Google?
• Can Mozilla create real market share outside the browser?
• Should Mozilla be focused on browser share, or leave that to Google Chrome and concentrate instead on HTML-related technologies?
• What is Mozilla, in the end? What does the Foundation want to be?

These are the questions born of success. They are not attacks on Mozilla, but the most successful experiment always raises more questions than it answers. Mozilla is, as they say when a soccer team is attacking, “asking the questions.” Which questions should it be asking?

Where, then, does Mozilla go from here? Now that certainties have disappeared, how does its dreams survive? In an open source world, these are not just questions for the Foundation’s directors. They are also questions for you.

The creation of Pranav Mistry, a PH.D candidate at MIT’s Media Lab, it’s described as a “wearable gesteral interface” whose hardware comprises a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera.

(The illustration is from Mistry’s Web site.)

Mistry’s idea is that these components will be worn like  pendant, with the computer they’re wirelessly connected to kept in a pocket.

Using Sixth Sense, data is displayed in the air and manipulated using hand gestures. When Mistry is demonstrating it, he looks like a magician.

It’s cool. And it’s going to launch as open source.

“I don’t want this to comply with some corporate policy,” he told Rediff while in India demonstrating the interface at the TEDIndia Conference. “I want people to make their own system. Why not?”

Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source.

There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time.

The release of Closure Tools by Google under an open source license is all about putting more muscle behind Javascript, whose underlying Java language is under a cloud due to the Oracle-Sun merger.

Web developers face a choice between using Javascript and the Microsoft AJAX Library, part of .Net, in developing Web applications. Google would rather you use tools it depends on, its AJAX Library, and its Web Toolkit.

As C}Net’s own Stephen Shankland notes today, Google has pushed Javascript to its limits in GMail and  Google Docs, and developed its Chrome browser in part so Javascript could run faster. Google likes Javascript like Cookie Monster (above, from yesterday’s Google home page) likes cookies.

Anything Google can do to make Javascript more valuable to you is in its best interests, and the tools described on its blog today are pretty marvelous.

• Closure Compiler is a Javascript optimizer that packs code tighter than your best friend’s jeans.
• Closure Library is a Javascript library with low-level utilities and high-level widgets that work on a wide variety of browsers and can be called on as-needed.
• Closure Templates are implemented for both Javascript and Java, so they can be called from clients or servers.

It is indeed, as one wag put it, a Javascript candy store. It wants to be your favorite candy store. It wants to be your only candy store. No Pepsi, Coke.

(I found this charming mashup of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as Dr. Evil at The Big Deal, a blog by Stefano Buliani.)

Without the competition of open source, I doubt Microsoft’s trend toward bureaucracy could have ever been slowed. Every company goes through its own aging process, and renewal only occurs under pressure.

Open source has strained every muscle Microsoft has — legal, marketing, development, management — but the recession of the last year has brought a turn. Resistance within the open source industry to Microsoft’s entry has gone down. This is easy to see in the writings of our own Matt Asay.

The success of the CodePlex Foundation has given Microsoft another entree into the Fortunate 500. It has allowed Microsoft to be the rabbi of these companies as they approach open source, making strategic code releases and building their own internal communities.

Then there have been Microsoft’s own code releases, which have accelerated since OSI approval of its branded licenses. Plus that sweet, sweet Windows 7 cash.

All in all, a good year. A year of peace and progress. And I can hear you grinding your teeth from here.

Despite all of Microsoft’s actions these last few years, the company remains intensely controversial among open source advocates. For me to write the word Microsoft (Microsoft, Microsoft) here at the open source blog leads to a Pavlovian response.

Actually it leads to two Pavlovian responses. There’s the “Microsoft is evil” response, and a corresponding “Microsoft is not evil” response. And this distrust, this air of controversy, continues to cost Microsoft money.

Microsoft executives still have to walk into open source meetings with shields up, while continuing to protect their bureaucratic flanks within the company. This is easy to see when you hear the smiles on former Microsoft open source executives as they speak from their new gigs. It’s wearing.

Since I began writing this blog, nearly 5 years ago, I have watched Microsoft seek to transform itself from a company that sold code to one that sells the services code provides, and I have watched open source projects see the value in having commercial arms that protect more of their right to make money from copyright.

What I have not seen is any reduction in intensity when I write the word Microsoft, from readers, e-mail correspondents, or the open source people I meet.

Why is that, I wonder. Are all those who hate Microsoft extremists, and will Microsoft ever find happiness in an open source world?

He told me it suits him.

“Instead of pushing boulders up the hill I’m going down the hill. Sonoa has 65 employees. I talk to customers directly, daily, instead of monthly. There’s less operational overhead. So I’m getting out more, talking at events more, talking to journalists and analysts more.

“At Microsoft there is no such thing as a staff job. You have to always be driving strategy, be a subject matter expert, and get into detail as much as necessary. I had a 120 person team in a 90,000 person organization.

“As Vice President for Strategy at Sonoa Systems I’m a one man show.” He also gets more family time — he describes himself on his personal blog as an “avid husband and father of two.”

That blog (now part of the blogroll here) is also now a great place to get Ramji’s honest views on cloud computing, CodePlex, and open source in general, as in this piece “free is not the opposite of commercial.”

Ramji describes Sonoa as being among the many start-ups working to define what will become the LAMP stack of cloud computing. (That’s a close-up of its home page, describing its offerings, to the left.)

This means competitors are often collaborators. “We’re all trying to figure out how our technologies connect” with the primary competition coming from clients’ in-house development.

He described one Sonoa solution, for MTV, involving RightScale, Amazon, Sonoa and Xen, all working together. “It seems like we do the same thing, but when we get deployed you realize that managing the virtual infrastructure is different from managing cloud service traffic. Stacks are just starting to emerge and each component is important.”

So Ramji has gone from a world where everything is defined and the fight is continuous to one where nothing is defined and contention is nebulous. It’s more wide-open and, he says, more fun.

So there is life after Microsoft, in the clouds.

The Vodafone 360 Samsung M1 looks uncomfortably like an iPhone, only with three buttons below the screen. The name is a hybrid — Vodafone 360 refers to the carrier’s service platform, Samsung M1 the phone manufacturer.

And it’s the Vodafone 360 that is at the heart of it all. The company calls this its “web services strategy.” Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless of the U.S.

Version 2.0 of the LiMo platform was announced in September alongside another Samsung phone, the H1. While Android stories revolve around developers and phone makers, LiMo seems proudest of its agreements with carriers.

The M1 itself seems to be a dumbed-down version of the H1, with less memory, a smaller screen, and presumably a lower price. It seems the idea is to hit the low-end of the market with something that looks like an iPhone, but isn’t, and a network that seems like the Internet, but isn’t.

LiMo press announcements also tend to carry a breathless quality that hasn’t been seen in America since the 1980s, except among recent college graduates. Here’s a taste:

This latest handset developed by Samsung offers mobile consumers a unique mobile experience presented through Vodafone’s stunning feature-rich, highly customizable Vodafone 360 user interface (UI) – providing a new set of Internet services for the mobile and PC that gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favorites in one place.

You would think these people invented the handset.

Snark aside we are starting to see the dimensions of contrasting strategies among the various Linux handset groups. Android is about the makers, LiMo the carriers, and Moblin the developers.

Which will win the customers?

Sam Ramji (right), the former Microsoft executive who remains President of CodePlex, president of the CodePlex Foundation, which surrounds the Microsoft open source repository, said the key to success is a process.

CodePlex has published a draft of its process, a Project Acceptance Guideline, and is seeking comments from the community on it. The draft describes the advantages of contribution and provides a step-by-step guide for delivering new projects to CodePlex.

Ramji told ZDNet he’s anxious to get community input into the Guideline and will take that input seriously. He wants CodePlex to become a bridge between the open source community and corporate interests.

“How do we solve the problem of corporate contribution to community projects?” he asked. “The barrier is comfort. That comes from a clearly understood process and a well understood mechanism so people see contributing as low risk.”

Ramji said the Codeplex process says “here is how you should contribute in a way that’s sustainable for you and safe for the developer. There should be derivative works with no concerns about patents.”

CodePlex contributions come from software companies and non-industry sources, Ramji said. Software companies learn, through the CodePlex process, which elements of their IP are valuable and which are more valuable in the commons.

Then there are the non-industry contributions.

“Wall Street banks have talked to me over the last few months about contributions they couldn’t get legal clearance on. CodePlex offers a template for how it can get done. We have an organization that can own the copyright, that can accept cash as well as code, and can do the community management.”

In both these cases CodePlex is delivering code to the commons that might not be contributed otherwise, valuable code that can be used to build new applications.

“CodePlex is a lot of my future now,” he said, even though he has left Microsoft to become vice president of strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.

And the work is gratifying. “The Foundation is growing pretty quickly in terms of input from community members and corporate interests.”

The result, the company believes, will be a one-stop shop for building mobile applications that run as well as native apps across multiple platforms.

Funambol has its developers in Italy, Zapatec in the Ukraine, but both have operations in Silicon Valley that will be consolidated in Redwood City. Zapatec CEO Dror Matalon will become vice president of emerging technologies for the combined company, said Funambol vice president of worldwide marketing Hal Steger.

The combined company is focused on a tough problem for mobile developers, namely how do you create apps that integrate with native apps, yet don’t have to be completely rewritten for each platform.

Steger said Funambol’s sync technology solves part of the first problem, Zapatec most of the second, and the combination will enable a total solution.

“A lot of people think the future of mobile apps will be like Web apps, like AJAX apps on desktop browsers,” said Steger. “If you can build a Web app that works on a lot of phones you can just build one version.”

Not exactly. “Mobile is different from desktops because two of the most important things you need to do are integrate with the core apps on the phone, like the address book and calendar, because other apps do.” This makes it harder to build a single app for multiple platforms and carriers.

Funambol solves part of the problem since its mobile sync is designed to be cross-platform and cross-carrier. Zapatec solves the coding problem.

You can call this innovation, but then it’s all based on an open source core. Developers will want to do business with Funambol, not just download its stuff, to get the full effect, Steger said, but the effect should be cool.