For the third year in a row, mobile open source software projects have more than doubled in number, with the current count at around 18,000, up from around 8,000 in 2010. The rise of mobile computing in the enterprise, coupled with the Android’s rapid adoption worldwide, contributes to the trend as developers race to be the first to market with mobile innovations.
Those findings come from Black Duck Software, which maintains the Black Duck Knowledge Base, a database of more than 600,000 open source projects from 5,000-plus sites. Of the new mobile open source projects in 2011, 70 were developed for Android, whereas 20 percent were built for iOS.