Software industry

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Starting in the 1980s, application software has been sold in mass-produced packages through retailers

Software industry is a term used to describe the group of businesses involved in the development and maintenance of computer software. The software industry started in the mid-1970s at the time of the personal computer revolution. The industry also includes software services, such as training and consultancy.

There are mainly two types of businesses in the software industry; those developing proprietary software such as Microsoft, and those developing open source software. Developing proprietary software is costly and involves software licensing and the need to protect the software from cracking and piracy.

The main return on open source 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 monopolies and take a portion of their market share. Netscape's actions are an example of this, and thus Firefox has become a more popular.

The largest and most profitable of software companies are located in the United States. As of 2006, the software industry is dominated by Microsoft.

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