Gotta love these studies...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| JaseP Feb 14, 2012 12:32 PM EDT |
You really gotta love these studies... Great for "value added" puffery, but little more. Too bad nobody would have PAID all those developers to do (all of) it. And, if you apportion the cost over all of the 7.5B people who are free to use it at no cost, that's $2.53 US each... Not, $2.53B, but Two Dollars and Fifty three cents, as you would write in in a check. And even if you reducethe user base to 2B people, you're still under $10 US. |
| Khamul Feb 14, 2012 10:33 PM EDT |
I don't see the problem here. I only read the summary, but it looks like a standard "how much would this cost if we had to pay professionals to do it all?" study, to try to equate the value of this Free software to a dollar figure that policy people can understand better. Besides, your assertion isn't really correct. Maybe in today's real world no single entity would likely have paid those developers, but hypothetically governments and interested corporations could have done so, and in fact surely some of that code was written that way. Lots of companies donate to FOSS, and so do some governments as they see the benefits of paying once for something custom and letting society benefit, rather than paying over and over in yearly license costs for some proprietary company's buggy product that they're not allowed to modify or fix. The fact that everyone else in society is free to use that software is just a bonus. |
| JaseP Feb 15, 2012 10:14 AM EDT |
Actually, they HAVE done so,... That's why I used the "all"s in there... Much of open source development is actually done by paid developers working for corporations that get mutual advantage by using/developing open source. My (almost contradictory) point?!?! The studies are almost self-pleasuring,... Development on open source is done as part of these corporations other work,... What the studies are not factoring in is the mutual advantage part of open source and attempting to equate it to closed proprietary development. But it's a non sequitur. Open source development does not equate to a commercial development model. Only a game theory model of open source development works, in my opinion. |
| BernardSwiss Feb 15, 2012 7:29 PM EDT |
@JaseP OK, that's clearer, now. And the point about the additional points are very good ones. |
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