Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#2Wow, killer of a first paragraph.
>Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide. In addition, open-source software is included in 96 percent of all codebases.
Not shocking to see the big guns coming hard at FOSS.
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#3And no company pays them enough to even cover the living expenses.
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#4Wow, killer of a first paragraph. >Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide. In addition, open-source software is included in 96 percent of all codebases. Not shocking to see the big guns coming hard at FOSS.
$8.8T*0.95/3000 = $2.8B
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#5That value and cost-factory is likely a higher multiple when talking about infrastructure. If everyone had to pay for Windows (or a similar OS) instead of Linux and numerous other systems (PostgreSQL, OpenLDAP, Nginx, ...) our costs for hosting services would move up at least an order of magnitude.
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#6That value and cost-factory is likely a higher multiple when talking about infrastructure. If everyone had to pay for Windows (or a similar OS) instead of Linux and numerous other systems (PostgreSQL, OpenLDAP, Nginx, ...) our costs for hosting services would move up at least an order of magnitude.
And you also would have to factor in the negative externalities of giving the profesional managerial class like Bill Gates more money and power.
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#7Wow, killer of a first paragraph. >Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide. In addition, open-source software is included in 96 percent of all codebases. Not shocking to see the big guns coming hard at FOSS.
> Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide
Linus is probably 60% of that?
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#8And no company pays them enough to even cover the living expenses.
Companies have shareholders and responsibilities.
They have to choose between contributing a salary for a year to open source projects that are the foundation of their business or fuelling one of the corporate jets for an hour. Making these sorts of tough decisions are what the 10mil+ in bonuses are for at the end of the year.
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#9And no company pays them enough to even cover the living expenses.
I suspect many of these open source developers are employed in this capacity on some level by for-profit corporations (which sadly does bring a high degree of dysfunction in terms of resource allocation). But I can't imagine being this productive as a side-gig.
Re: Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars
#10That value and cost-factory is likely a higher multiple when talking about infrastructure. If everyone had to pay for Windows (or a similar OS) instead of Linux and numerous other systems (PostgreSQL, OpenLDAP, Nginx, ...) our costs for hosting services would move up at least an order of magnitude.
And you also would have to factor in the negative externalities of giving the profesional managerial class like Bill Gates more money and power.
How does open source avoid that? Red Hat, which got bought by IBM; both of them have executives in spades, as does Google and Meta, both of them are huge supporters of open source. (Not including Llama. Fsck Mark Zuckerberg for co-opting the term Open Source for llama when it isn't)