Is Open Source Eating the World's Software? Measuring the Proportion of Open Source in Proprietary Software Using Java Binaries

That open source software comprises an increasingly large percentage of modern software applications has become conventional wisdom. The exact extent to which open source software constitutes today's applications is indeterminate, however, at least by the standards of the academic software engineering research community. This paper proposes a methodology and associated tool that can analyze Java binaries and determine the proportion of open source that comprises them. This paper also presents empirical measurements of 5 commercial Java software systems, reporting OSS proportions between 76.2% to 99.9% among these 5 systems, including a historical analysis covering 6 versions and 12 years for one of the subject systems.