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> 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 use

by zugi 3y ago

> 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) 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. 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.

eviks 3y ago
> Estimating $300,000 per developer Or broaden then base of developers available to replace it and you can get an estimate a few times lower, so it'd take ~25 years to recreate it with a workforce 10% of G. Is 25 years more realistic?
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
  Not to mention said company needs to pay for all the tooling from the other proprietary companies going out of business all the time. The prices with be exponential.
asadotzler 3y ago
Firefox alone is like 21 million lines of open source code and I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome was similar. Microsoft, with hundreds of thousands of employees, may of them developers, chose to abandon their long-established browser codebase and hop on Chromium because maintaining a browser engine, probably about 80% of the code, was just too much for them to handle. And that's one single app. Simply maintaining Firefox takes a couple hundred million dollars a year, and if you scaled back to minimal effort outside of security fixes and critical new features to stay competitive, I don't think you could get it under one hundred million dollars a year. Developers are doing a bit more than coding Firefox of course, there's CI and deployment of new releases every two weeks to hundreds of millions of devices that's all automated and requires maintenance and updates bt the point is that if one project, Firefox, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, how can all of FOSS be as little as 4 billion?

by zugi 3y ago

eviks 3y ago

> Estimating $300,000 per developer Or broaden then base of developers available to replace it and you can get an estimate a few times lower, so it'd take ~25 years to recreate it with a workforce 10% of G. Is 25 years more realistic?

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
Not to mention said company needs to pay for all the tooling from the other proprietary companies going out of business all the time. The prices with be exponential.

asadotzler 3y ago

Firefox alone is like 21 million lines of open source code and I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome was similar. Microsoft, with hundreds of thousands of employees, may of them developers, chose to abandon their long-established browser codebase and hop on Chromium because maintaining a browser engine, probably about 80% of the code, was just too much for them to handle. And that's one single app. Simply maintaining Firefox takes a couple hundred million dollars a year, and if you scaled back to minimal effort outside of security fixes and critical new features to stay competitive, I don't think you could get it under one hundred million dollars a year. Developers are doing a bit more than coding Firefox of course, there's CI and deployment of new releases every two weeks to hundreds of millions of devices that's all automated and requires maintenance and updates bt the point is that if one project, Firefox, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, how can all of FOSS be as little as 4 billion?