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always been widely accepted within the GNOME community and an example
of this fact is that in GNOME it is possible to programme in many languages.
Its implementation, however, has not been as extensive as could have been
expected and it is slightly more extensive than Shell. On another note, Python
and Lisp were accepted fairly widely in GNOME, as is proven by the relative
importance of this classification, whereas Java has never really taken off pro-
bably due to an incomplete link.
Table 11. Programming languages used in GNOME
Programming language Code lines Percentage
C 7,918,586 86.10%
C++ 576,869 6.27%
Perl 199,448 2.17%
Shell 159,263 1.73%
Python 137,380 1.49%
Lisp 88,546 0.96%
9.4.6. Academic studies on GNOME
The most important studies on GNOME in the academic sphere are the fo-
llowing two: "Results from software engineering research into open source de-
velopment projects using public data" [158] and "The evolution of GNOME"
[132].
• [158] is one of the first large-scale studies of software in the sphere of
free software. The authors of the study took advantage of the fact that
the details of the development are usually publicly accessible in order to
measure the efforts and compare them against the cost estimate models,
and traditional time and effort measurements. One of the classical models
with which they compared them was the one used in this chapter, model
COCOMO.
• [132] briefly goes over the objectives of GNOME and its short history, as
well as the GNOME project's use of technology.
9.5. Apache
The HTTP Apache server is one of the star applications of the world of free
software, as it is the web server that is most widely implemented, accor-
ding to its real-time survey (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/01/
august_2003_web_server_survey.html) [167]. For example, in May 1999, 57%