SEATTLE, USA: SourceLabs, has announced the top ten most prevalent support issues and search data for supporting Linux and Open Source Java for the month of September 2008. The report is compiled from monthly searches performed by users of SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite.

With an over 400 percent growth in data month over month, SourceLabs’ repository search returns results that represent the number of times a particular request for support using a specific open source technology or project was searched on. SourceLabs’ 20 million+ object repository provides support answers to issues reported in over 150 open source software projects. In addition to open source software tools for IT administrators and developers, SourceLabs provides professional enterprise-wide software support contracts for Linux and open source Java enterprises, providing them with a vendor-neutral way to support open source technologies.

“Open source software is a marketplace in which anyone can participate and it is that openness that creates one of the biggest challenges to support,” said Byron Sebastian, CEO of SourceLabs. “The fundamental way open source is developed and disseminated translates into a very broad distribution of demand, a broad distribution of development talent and, by extension, more potential solutions and approaches to solve problems. Yet this very ‘long tail’ creates a very broad set of specific problems and multiple solutions that are increasingly difficult to locate. SourceLabs’ Self-Support search technology makes this extremely long tail work for users by finding very specific fixes to their very specific issues using advanced algorithms and filtering technologies.”

In August, SourceLabs’ introduced hardware recognition and the search engine now correlates hardware data to all known bugs and dependences, creating the most accurate and precise service for troubleshooting and researching open source software available. SourceLabs Self-Support Suite is available as standalone software for individuals and for enterprises running open source software as part of a support contract or additionally, SourceLabs’ 20 million+ object repository can be combined with an organization’s internal data stores that are specific to large enterprise environments.

SourceLabs’ search technology represents a significant breakthrough in discovering, navigating, ranking and quickly filtering all known issues, bugs and software updates for the most popular open source Java and Linux software projects. Collecting the most up–to-date information available from all relevant sources, SourceLabs’ Intelligence Engine automatically indexes, tags, manages, and stores the information in a repository based on the relevance to a users’ specific environment and configuration. Using its data gathering tools together with sophisticated pattern matching and natural language processing, SourceLabs’ predictive analysis algorithms then match data against the Information Repository to provide immediate answers.

The top ten most prevalent search words for development issues related to open source development software are:

1. rhel (redhat enterprise linux) 5.78 percent
2. error 4.79 percent
3. xen 4.53 percent
4. ubuntu 4.44 percent
5. failed 3.34 percent
6. linux 3.12 percent
7. redhat 3.08 percent
8. suse 3.03 percent
9. samba 2.95 percent
10. fedora 2.89 percent