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New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

blogs.worldbank.org

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Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#11

Post by amorphid »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple. I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on h…

One thing I've noticed is I am actually less interested in writing software that should be open source, but isn't. The kind of stuff where we'd never sell it, no one would ever buy it, yet my current employer paid me to write it, and the next employer will pay me to write it again. Solving a problem the first time is almost always interesting. Grinding through it again is less interesting, especially if it's hard to remember how I did it the first time. I always enjoy coding, but I try not to build the same thing twice, at least not in the same language.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#12

Post by ajc-sorin »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #9
Top19 wrote: post #6

A good example of the ROI of Open Source is the OpenEMR project. That free system replaces multi-hundred thousand dollar hospital systems from companies like Cerner. I used to work at Oracle, and when I found out about OpenEMR I remember thinking "this makes the price difference between Oracle Enterprise Edition and MySQL Community look trivial". A lot of times I hear the implementation cost is where all the money is…

Actually I think the Open Source community does have that incentive, assuming the developers are making a living as system integrators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Obvious

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#13

Post by justforFranz »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple. I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on h…

ROI for whom?!? Who is investing money here? Who is reaping the rewards of investment? Yeah, no shit getting people to work for free has a high ROI. What the heck?

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#14

Post by bsears »

roymurdock wrote: post #7

Good case study on one successful open source project. Shouldn't be used to draw any broader conclusions about impact of open source on any company's biz model. Some portions of typical software stacks are amenable to open source biz models (such as general purpose server OS), while many others are not. Note that the study does not actually measure ROI from a revenue perspective, but estimates based on theoretical sa…

I'm currently working on trying to replicate the success Wordpress has seen in monetizing open-source, It's my belief that the key to creating a viable open-source product revolves around creating a platform people can host themselves and make it open to plugin development. I don't see much value in the smaller projects most people work on because those rely on licensing for revenue.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#15

Post by kfogel »

mikekchar wrote: post #5

I haven't had time to read the report in detail, but it appears that the 200% ROI figure is simply derived from the ratio of externally written software to internally written software. So, by writing an open source tool instead of keeping it closed, they got contributions of code that exceeded their own investment. However, this is not actually the main point of the paper, and neither is it the whole picture. For exa…

Expenses like conferences (both organizing and sending attendees) are accounted for on the "investment" side of the ledger in this report, FWIW.

(Full disclosure: I'm one of the authors.)

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#16

Post by dqv »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple. I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on h…

>it's just a douche bag move to sell software and proactively prevent users from having freedom to understand, fix or modify it for their needs

I work in an industry that has a particularly nasty case of vendor lock-in. There are only a few vendors and they all do things the same way: no API and no innovation.

They are causing things to stagnate for the whole industry. I don't get why they don't realize that even just having an API (not even open source!) would lock someone in way tighter than any crappy gimmick feature.

I see open source as a regulator - a reference point that signals to closed vendors that they had better keep innovating or people will jump ship. When it's not there, it makes the vendors slow down since they know they can play it safe with the barriers for migration.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#17

Post by seanhandley »

justforFranz wrote: post #13
TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple. I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on h…

ROI for whom?!? Who is investing money here? Who is reaping the rewards of investment? Yeah, no shit getting people to work for free has a high ROI. What the heck?

A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#18

Post by maxxxxx »

seanhandley wrote: post #17
justforFranz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ROI for whom?!? Who is investing money here? Who is reaping the rewards of investment? Yeah, no shit getting people to work for free has a high ROI. What the heck?

A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".

I wonder what the percentage of Linux kernel devs who are paid for doing it versus the ones that do it on the side. I bet the paid percentage is higher.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#19

Post by codelitt »

pavement wrote: post #4

Link references link: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/leveraging-open-source-... Which references link: https://opendri.org/resource/opendri-geonode-a-case-study-fo... Which references PDF: https://opendri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/OpenDRI-and-G... Titled: OPEN DATA FOR RESILIENCE INITIATIVE & GEONODE A CASE STUDY ON INSTITUTIONAL INVESTMENTS IN OPEN SOURCE

Maybe dang can change both the title and the link. The World Bank blog is quite good as is the original paper. The linked article is complete garbage with a sensationalized title.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#20

Post by TallGuyShort »

justforFranz wrote: post #13
TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple. I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on h…

ROI for whom?!? Who is investing money here? Who is reaping the rewards of investment? Yeah, no shit getting people to work for free has a high ROI. What the heck?

What open source projects do you know where there's a significant portion of the work being done for free and a corporation reaping significant rewards? I mean if you look at the Linux and Hadoop ecosystems, the most successful companies dump significant money into contributing to all sorts of projects. And most of the significant contributors I know are professional. You do see more involved bug reports from users and more student projects, but it's a minority of the work, and I'd argue they're reaping some good benefits from the community themselves. Mozilla is a community I've known several work-for-free contributors in, but Mozilla's not exactly raking in cash and flying their executives to exotic destinations in private jets all the time as far as I know.

My point above is precisely that I see open-source pitched to companies as "look you can get the community working for you" but I think that's (a) missing the point of free software, and (b) probably not happening much. Dumping stuff on Github might get some pull requests generated, but you don't get a functioning community without investing heavily in it yourself. Companies that don't really invest in open source generally have ghost-town communities and aren't well equipped to harness the power of those pull requests to begin with - it goes both ways.

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