Open source projects are proliferating in the cloud, growing 70% from 2008 to 2009, according to an analysis made public Monday by Black Duck Software.

Aimed at enabling enterprise IT application development for cloud computing, some 400 projects specifically associated with cloud computing were found in Black Duck’s study. The firm provides products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software.

Black Duck uncovered open source project information by analyzing its own KnowledgeBase of open source projects. The approach helped Black Duck identify cloud environments. Black Duck found Amazon to be the leading cloud environment followed, in order, by Microsoft’s Azure, Google Apps Engine and Force.com.

“When we began the analysis we expected to find projects focused on security, privacy and management,” said Peter Vescuso, Black Duck’s executive vice president, in a statement.

“The variety of projects that self-identify as ‘cloud’ is much broader in scope, reflecting the sophistication of the cloud application ecosystem and confirming the importance of OS cloud software developed to support the needs of enterprise IT,” said Vescuso.

Black Duck collects open source code by searching the Internet, collecting information about projects and code and directs the results on more than 250,000 open source projects from more than 4,500 unique websites.

Black Duck noted that the private and public clouds collected in its searches includes such well-known projects as Hadoop, Eucalyptus, Hyperic, deltaCloud, Open Stack and OpenECP.

Open source application developers have been attracted to cloud environments largely because of the cloud's low-cost availability, particularly in the wake of the recession and financial crisis that has visited so many firms and organizations in recent months.