Software industry

Software industry is the collective name given to businesses related to the production and maintenance of computer software, with its roots in the IT phenomenon. The industry also includes software services, such as training, consulting, and maintenance.

This table, derived from the Software Magazine 500 for 2005 [1] shows the total amount of revenue brought by software and software services companies, per locale.

Location	Total Revenue Millions of US$
CA	111836.8
NY	101485.1
TX	40606.1
WA	34744.5
MA	19524.9
PA	18470.0
NJ	9141.3
MD	8564.9
MO	5486.0
WI	3729.7
VA	3553.3
NC	3497.9
IL	3490.2
OH	3404.1
FL	3350.4
GA	2835.0
CO	2522.9
MN	1483.3
MI	1305.7
AR	1225.9
OR	716.8
Japan	603.7
AL	573.3
England	550.3
VT	520.7
Canada	498.7
AZ	388.6
NH	296.6
NE	292.8
UT	247.6
SC	201.5
CT	102.4
MT	61.8
IN	55.1
IA	51.1
ID	47.3
KY	43.7
NV	23.1
BC	15.8
OK	10.4
NB	7.8
KS	7.6
Germany	4.4
ND	2.1

There are mainly two types of businesses based on software industry; one builds and sells properietary software (like Microsoft, for example). This involves issues that add to the cost of the software itself, like Software Licensing and Software Protection from cracking and piracy (like using hardware dongles, for example).

The other type of business is based on developing open source software. The main return on investment here comes from selling services, such as training and support, rather than the software itself.

Despite doing much business in properietary software, some companies (like Sun Microsystems and IBM) participate in developing free and open source software to deter from monopoly of other companies and to take a portion from their market share. Netscape's actions are an example of this, and thus Firefox has become popular.

See also

• Personal Computer
• Software
• Software development
• Software engineering
• Software engineering economics

External links

• Software Industry Professionals website
• Software and Information Industry Association website
• Software Magazine website