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From one of the articles the article refers to: "[According to Harvard something] value of OSS to the economy is 4.15 Billion USD." That seems ludicrously lo

From one of the articles the article refers to: "[According to Harvard something] value of OSS to the economy is 4.15 Billion USD." That seems ludicrously low - Linux itself, if you value it at $1 per install is considerably more that 4 billion USD. The various open source web projects powering all the large sites are more than billions. Banks may not pay for SSL but they receive economic value. Etc. etc. And it's not a labor surplus except for those poor souls that are trying to make their fortune with an OSS "side project." It is a method of doing things where results are shared and improved upon, fundamentally the scientific way brought into applications. Unlike physical devices, it's essentially free to share software. Just don't put access controls on the git repos. There is a tendency to overly productize things, but that's not the heart of open source; the heart is just to share results, perhaps in a hope that ones labor can contribute to the progress of humanity. I don't need to promise to fix issues ever for my source code to potentially have value to someone solving a similar problem. Now, it's harder to achieve this way of working in corporations, and things have to split into "open source with some modular hooks for private things that aren't open source" (even just in-house logging or metrics systems), but it's not impossible, and does have the same advantage science has - it grows exponentially and eventually will figure out how to do anything that is doable.

bee_rider 2y ago
I do agree that the open source ecosystem seems worth more than that. But $1 per Linux install seems like a kind of arbitrary pick that might not meet our intuition, if you want to hit 4B installs. Like, there are only ~8B people, and most of them don’t use Linux on the desktop, so we must be including other uses of Linux. Routers, IOT. I’m pretty sure my lightbulbs run Linux. Is Linux supplying $1 of value per lightbulb? I’m not sure, I suspect smart bulb manufacturers could have gone with some proprietary stack if Linux didn’t exist, and it might cost less than $1 per lightbulb… actually, I have no idea, but I don’t think $1 is an obvious lower bound.
- stonemetal12 2y ago
  Okay so lets say $10 for every Android cellphone that puts you at 30 billion. Not sure how you want to estimate server installs but a quick google puts forth 96% of web servers run Linux.
- ang_cire 2y ago
  $1 is ludicrously low as an OS licensing fee, if we're suggesting non-FOSS, proprietary alternatives.
amadvance 2y ago
The linked article says something different: 'We first estimate the supply-side value by calculating the cost to recreate the most widely used OSS once. We then calculate the demand-side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist. We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion.'
- abtinf 2y ago
  The methodology used in the underlying paper is, to put it generously, not even wrong. Way past “assume a spherical cow” territory. It supposes you could simply hire programmers to build OSS from scratch. If you have ever worked on a large project in a corporation, you instantly know how shockingly ignorant this is. Hint: many of them end in failure and are never released at all. Then there are the massive amplifications that happen due to the mere existence of open source: learning, spreading of ideas, reusable tooling, and more. Has any business school ever produced a paper worth a damn? https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-502c-4139-8bf2-56eb4b65c58a.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    As you say, whatever the real cost is, it's much higher than one that supposes every company could reproduce F/OSS. How amazing then, that even in this hypothetical universe where everyone could, we still wouldn't want to due to the enormous cost. Providing a lower bound on value, and furthermore one that is astronomically high, is extremely useful as an eye-opener. This is a useful result for policy-makers.
    - abtinf 2y ago
      A plausible lower bound would be useful, but $4B is a joke. That’s less than the annual budget of single major university (Harvard is around ~$5-6B). Gartner says the world spent $4.5T on IT in 2022. To pick some numbers out of thin air, let’s assume half of that is on software, and half of that is on new software (not maintenance). And the let’s assume that software is sold at ~20% net margin. And open source powers an enormous fraction of it at some level, but let’s be conservative and say it’s 10%. $4.5T * 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.8 * 0.1 = $90B per year just for the new stuff. Recreating the existing stacks… if we multiple that number by 25 years, you are at over $2T to rebuild OSS in some kind of manhattan project. But even that is a massive underestimate. For one, it would be competing with other development objectives—there aren’t millions of principle-level engineers just sitting idle. And more importantly, formally run projects have radically different levels of passion and “giving a shit” compared to how people often start OSS. You simply couldn’t do it at all. It would be like asking “okay, but assuming we really had to replace all the metal with wood, what would it cost to launch a manned wooden rocket ship to the moon?”
thomasahle 2y ago
The article itself starts with > The derived FOSS surplus generates billions, if not trillions, of dollars of value for the economy So I don't think the author is considering 4B to be the real number. According to [1], the entire tech industry is worth 5T globally. And gas grown at about 14% per year. IMO it's realistic that we'd be 10 years behind where we are now without open source. So that makes OSS worth 5-5/1.14^10 = $3.6T. 1: https://worldmetrics.org/tech-industry-statistics/ https://worldmetrics.org/tech-industry-statistics/
echelon 2y ago
> Linux itself, if you value it at $1 per install is considerably more that 4 billion USD Linux is $0.00 per install. This is like saying you could charge for air. It's important, but it's already free and abundant. You can't take it back and start charging for it anymore.
- jen20 2y ago
  The value and the cost are not the same.
- feoren 2y ago
  > This is like saying you could charge for air. Is the value of air $0 to you?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- duckmysick 2y ago
  Collectively, we spend an awful lot of resources on air. Clearly it must be of some value, otherwise we wouldn't bother. Unless it's a scam. Sure, we're not being metered and charged by volume of air used. But someone, somewhere, is spending money to make sure it's suitable for breathing. And it's a pretty penny too.

bee_rider 2y ago

I do agree that the open source ecosystem seems worth more than that. But $1 per Linux install seems like a kind of arbitrary pick that might not meet our intuition, if you want to hit 4B installs. Like, there are only ~8B people, and most of them don’t use Linux on the desktop, so we must be including other uses of Linux. Routers, IOT. I’m pretty sure my lightbulbs run Linux. Is Linux supplying $1 of value per lightbulb? I’m not sure, I suspect smart bulb manufacturers could have gone with some proprietary stack if Linux didn’t exist, and it might cost less than $1 per lightbulb… actually, I have no idea, but I don’t think $1 is an obvious lower bound.

stonemetal12 2y ago
Okay so lets say $10 for every Android cellphone that puts you at 30 billion. Not sure how you want to estimate server installs but a quick google puts forth 96% of web servers run Linux.
ang_cire 2y ago
$1 is ludicrously low as an OS licensing fee, if we're suggesting non-FOSS, proprietary alternatives.

amadvance 2y ago

The linked article says something different: 'We first estimate the supply-side value by calculating the cost to recreate the most widely used OSS once. We then calculate the demand-side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist. We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion.'

abtinf 2y ago
The methodology used in the underlying paper is, to put it generously, not even wrong. Way past “assume a spherical cow” territory. It supposes you could simply hire programmers to build OSS from scratch. If you have ever worked on a large project in a corporation, you instantly know how shockingly ignorant this is. Hint: many of them end in failure and are never released at all. Then there are the massive amplifications that happen due to the mere existence of open source: learning, spreading of ideas, reusable tooling, and more. Has any business school ever produced a paper worth a damn? https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-502c-4139-8bf2-56eb4b65c58a.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  As you say, whatever the real cost is, it's much higher than one that supposes every company could reproduce F/OSS. How amazing then, that even in this hypothetical universe where everyone could, we still wouldn't want to due to the enormous cost. Providing a lower bound on value, and furthermore one that is astronomically high, is extremely useful as an eye-opener. This is a useful result for policy-makers.
  - abtinf 2y ago
    A plausible lower bound would be useful, but $4B is a joke. That’s less than the annual budget of single major university (Harvard is around ~$5-6B). Gartner says the world spent $4.5T on IT in 2022. To pick some numbers out of thin air, let’s assume half of that is on software, and half of that is on new software (not maintenance). And the let’s assume that software is sold at ~20% net margin. And open source powers an enormous fraction of it at some level, but let’s be conservative and say it’s 10%. $4.5T * 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.8 * 0.1 = $90B per year just for the new stuff. Recreating the existing stacks… if we multiple that number by 25 years, you are at over $2T to rebuild OSS in some kind of manhattan project. But even that is a massive underestimate. For one, it would be competing with other development objectives—there aren’t millions of principle-level engineers just sitting idle. And more importantly, formally run projects have radically different levels of passion and “giving a shit” compared to how people often start OSS. You simply couldn’t do it at all. It would be like asking “okay, but assuming we really had to replace all the metal with wood, what would it cost to launch a manned wooden rocket ship to the moon?”

thomasahle 2y ago

The article itself starts with > The derived FOSS surplus generates billions, if not trillions, of dollars of value for the economy So I don't think the author is considering 4B to be the real number. According to [1], the entire tech industry is worth 5T globally. And gas grown at about 14% per year. IMO it's realistic that we'd be 10 years behind where we are now without open source. So that makes OSS worth 5-5/1.14^10 = $3.6T. 1: https://worldmetrics.org/tech-industry-statistics/ https://worldmetrics.org/tech-industry-statistics/

echelon 2y ago

> Linux itself, if you value it at $1 per install is considerably more that 4 billion USD Linux is $0.00 per install. This is like saying you could charge for air. It's important, but it's already free and abundant. You can't take it back and start charging for it anymore.

jen20 2y ago
The value and the cost are not the same.
feoren 2y ago
> This is like saying you could charge for air. Is the value of air $0 to you?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
duckmysick 2y ago
Collectively, we spend an awful lot of resources on air. Clearly it must be of some value, otherwise we wouldn't bother. Unless it's a scam. Sure, we're not being metered and charged by volume of air used. But someone, somewhere, is spending money to make sure it's suitable for breathing. And it's a pretty penny too.