Open Source Software has a hugely important factor that we don't talk about enough, IMHO: it promotes standards that are actually accepted.<p>Think about it. A new image compression standard comes out. What are the chances that it becomes widely accepted and used if there isn't any Open Source (or at least free) tooling to compress and decompress it? And just "free" might not be enough, because lots of folks need to incorporate it into their own software (image viewers, browsers, chat clients etc.), and they wouldn't take that risk if they could link it, but maybe not apply a security fix if the vendor didn't react quickly enough.<p>Image formats are a relatively benign example, but deeper in the stack, non-interoperability becomes much more of an issue. How many programming languages without Open Source implementations became really successful? How about OS APIs? Do you think we would have somewhat compatible libc and syscall landscapes without Open Source BSD distributions and Linux?<p>And then there's version control, implementation of communication standards (bluetooth, USB, but also TCP/IP stacks).... the more I think about it, the more horrifyingly fractured the software world would look without OSS as a unifying force.
> More precisely, our results show a cost of $4.15 billion if society had to replace these packages once (e.g., OSS still exists, but all of the most widely used packages were deleted and had to be rewritten)<p>I realize estimating anything numerically here is tough but that number just seems low by an order of magnitude or more. $4 billion is less than the cost to build one aircraft carrier. It's 1/3 the cost to build the Abraj Al Bait tower in Saudi Arabia. It's like 3% of the net worth of Bezos, Musk, Eliison, or Zuckerberg.<p>Recreating Linux alone would be a massive endeavor, taking hundreds of people many years, to say nothing of gcc and clang and git, and those are just the developer tools needed to build all the other stuff. Estimating $300,000 per developer (including salary + benefits + office space + computers), $4 billion is 13,000 person-years. Google has about 26,000 developers, so it's saying Google could recreate all open source software in 6 months. Or one tenth of Google could recreate all open source software in 5 years. Not that I have a better way of estimating, but the number doesn't seem realistic.
The method in the paper definitely seems flawed: if, for example, PostgreSQL would not exist, that doesn't mean every software company would be developing their own RDBMS -- the much more likely effect would be more mega-yachts for Larry Ellison...<p>I'm not even sure there <i>is</i> a sensible method to quantify the economic impact of Open Source, since it's pretty much an "alternate universe" situation. Without OSS, Linux would most likely not exist, meaning that... everyone would be paying for Unixware per-seat licenses? Which would probably make AWS a nonstarter, etc. etc. On the other hand, there <i>would</i> most likely be a lot more profitable small software companies, but not enough to make up the difference.<p>So, "Open Source is a good thing, economically" might be a defensible statement, but putting an actual Dollar value on that will always be more fiction than science.
It makes no sense to estimate the total cost of the proprietary equivalent of _all_ that is currently OSS at $177M. It would be spread over at minimum thousands of companies and each company would try to get their margin, needs to be rewarded for the risk they’re taking, etc.<p>The HBS method to get to 3.5X isn’t sensible (as the author points out, not everyone would build) but the truth is somewhere in-between.<p>The COGS of software would be significantly higher if there was no OSS. But everyone knows that already. I don’t think any new information has been created here.
I think a better estimate of cost would be to take the number of developers, multiple by an average salary, add the costs of marketing folks and management, add the costs of offices and then multiple by 3 (profit margin).<p>That would give the base a amount that companies building the replacement software for OSS would need to earn.<p>I doubt very much that would be a figure around 177million.<p>Also what happens now is that companies take OSS, modify it in house and then either give back those changes or use them as a competitive edge. Would this be possible if the software is sold with a restrictive proprietary license?
> The top 5 programming languages contain C (including C# and C++), [...]<p>Including C++ in the "C" category is _maybe_ defensible (at least the use cases overlap), but including C# is crazy. And then in the same sentence they list JS and TS as different languages!
This seems like clickbait, but I do not want to label ideas prematurely.<p>I understand the point that the author is picking a pretty narrow window of potential benefits from Open Source software.<p>For me personally, having access to open-source software made it possible for me to learn and apply data analysis and visualization techniques when reasoning about incarceration data. I used the Seaborn Python library (open-source) to help me complete my final project and get my bachelor's degree. With education being a provable form of climbing the social ladder, and open-source software helping me, hopefully, the author can see the value for developers (who will likely go on to work at a company).
...Therefore he decided let the world know of his reasoning<p>"A single company and 177M$ could rewrite everything that is open source" he wrote, on his 30M cloc open source browser, which dutifully sent packets to his router running 35M cloc open kernel, compiled with a 10M cloc open compiler.<p>"That figure looks a bit low", said the developer, thinking about all the software in his linux distribution, mostly-open phone and untold gizmos lying around in his house<p>"Didn't we sell mysql for 1B$ in 2008? Good thing nobody noticed" someone thought in the background<p>"...You want to do what with that chump change?" thought the red hat executive, a 19k employee and multi-billion dollar company built around open source<p>but it was all just a passing thought, and everyone forgot about it a few minutes later
Is the theoretical cost to reproduce what OSS has created even the important metric here? The benefit to society seems like it has been many many times greater than the value of the labor contributed to open source software.
Ah, this is easy, the value of software is essentially 0.<p>It's possible some one may exhort money via legal machinations but other than that I don't see how it can have any value whatsoever. It's write once then exist infinitely forever, how is that not valued at 0? If all it actually takes is a little time and humans have that in spades.<p>Software may facilitate doing some other activity more efficiently but without that what would it actually be.
Recent and related:<p><i>The Value of Open Source Software</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340277">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340277</a>
> "<i>More precisely, our results show a cost of $4.15 billion if society had to replace these packages once</i>"<p>Or 1 month of Microsoft Office revenue.
I generally don't accept the result of studies which claim "If we had replaced W with X, we would save Y amount of Z." IMO, there are too many variables involved to make such assertions. The models for coming to such conclusions are way too simplistic.<p>For the same reason, I don't even buy retrospective arguments like "We switched from W to X and ended up with Y fewer/more of Z."<p>It reminds me of TypeScript mania when companies where claiming "We switched from JavaScript to TypeScript and reduced bugs by X%."<p>It's nonsense. They could probably have reduced bugs by X% merely by rewriting the project, even if they stuck with JavaScript. Rewrites are almost always much better than the first iteration, simply because developers learned what the issues and pain points were and were better equipped to avoid them during the rewrite.
This article is just a stealth extension of the so called 'open source sustainability crisis' argument.<p>Basically, it's just a bunch of people wanting to work on open source software and demanding to be paid for it. Like literally demanding you pay them for using their software!<p>I'll repeat here what I always say to them. If you demand to be paid for creating open source software, then maybe it's not for you because you don't seem to understand the license you added.
I will always consider OSS extremely harmful to normally employed software engineers and supporting roles around them. OSS makes it easier add value to a company, something only the owners, shareholders and, maybe, founders profit from. It's bad for software engineers themselves, because you need less of them.<p>Without OSS, there would be much more duplicate work available across companies.
I learned that OSS is actually worthless. If the code, as an artifact, had any value there would be all kinds of tax implications.<p>This is a weird point of view to me but still a valid one. I agree with it to some degree: Having the code is not as valuable as the capability (skills, knowledge, etc) to change it. In other words, the most valuable part of an OSS project is not the code but the core developers.