The Open Source Census is a collaborative project that collects Open Source usage information from companies that volunteer the information. The OSS Discovery tool requires Ruby to be installed on a system to be run. The tool collects fingerprints of many Open Source applications on the scanned computer (it does NOT crawl the network). The results are submitted anonymously to the project.
The project was started by OpenLogic and is sponsored by numerous entities including Collabnet, IDC, Microsoft, the Open Source Business Association, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.
Requires Ruby to be installed ? That will bias the results somewhat !
If my Ubuntu at home has Ruby, it wasn't intentional, although likely has been dragged in by *something*, but I'm fairly sure all the numerous AIX/Solaris/VMS/RedHat systems and that other "OS" that runs on VMware at the office -- all of which have quite a bit of F/LOSS -- do NOT have Ruby. A few have tried it, very few, but none within my reach. So I won't be submitting to this "Census".
If the tool were implemented in both Perl and Java, it would run almost everywhere without additional pre-requisites, as almost anywhere with a browser or a shell has one or the other, even if perhaps an old shabby Perl 5.005.
Bill: The Red Hat derivatives have Ruby available as an installation option. But, you are right, I can't think of any of the various *nix distros that install Ruby by default. Windows definitely does not. Mac OS X, however, installs both Ruby and Rails by default. The Open Source Census site notes the problem you pointed out and says that a future version of the tool will install a Ruby interpreter along with their census tool.
Just a correction, although the OSS Discovery client (open source, see http://www.ossdiscovery.org) that is used for the OSS Census is written in Ruby, ruby is not required on the target system. There are bundles available on the OSS Census site that include JRuby (requires Java on the target machine) or that includes JRuby and Java (no special requirements). These other options are bigger downloads than the very small Ruby only distribution, but they will work on machines that don't have Ruby installed.
Just a correction, although the OSS Discovery client (open source, see http://www.ossdiscovery.org) that is used for the OSS Census is written in Ruby, ruby is not required on the target system. There are bundles available on the OSS Census site that include JRuby (requires Java on the target machine) or that includes JRuby and Java (no special requirements). These other options are bigger downloads than the very small Ruby only distribution, but they will work on machines that don't have Ruby installed. This page - https://www.osscensus.org/quick-start.php - lists all the download options.
Eric: Thanks for the clarification about the Ruby requirement.