An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs.

The study conducted by Black Duck Software, a provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software (OSS), points to the dramatic efficiencies and cost savings of open source code reuse.

In the review of well-known open source projects, Black Duck examined instances where reusable binary components from one open source project were included in the downloadable release of another project. GNU Automake leads the list of the most-reused code, appearing as a component of 12,469 other project releases.

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