Now available: "Census III of Free and Open Source Software: Application Libraries"

[David A. Wheeler]

I'm happy to announce as of 2024-12-04 the release of the report
"Census III of Free and Open Source Software: Application Libraries"
by Frank Nagle, Kate Powell, Richie Zitomer, and David A. Wheeler (me). URL:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/census-iii

This report tries to answer the question, "what is the most popular
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)?" This one uses SCA vendor
data looking inside applications. This means it will necessarily undercount
system packages (which are often not considered part of the application),
but it *does* give insight into what FOSS is being included in
applications in a way that's hard to determine otherwise.

The goal was to try to help identify the most popular ones, then try
to help those projects if they need help. We as a society want these
projects to protect their build process... including by having
reproducible builds.

Anyway, I thought some people here would want to know!

--- David A. Wheeler