21–30 of 38 posts
Three blogs deep, there's a link to the actual paper.[1] It's a study of one project, a geospatial database: "Starting in 2009, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and its partners developed GeoNode: web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data. Today, GeoNode is a pu…
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.
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…
1) Why on Earth would a company spend a considerable amount of resources on doing something that isn't good for them financially? That's their thing, and in the whole scheme of things seems like good separation of concerns. Companies make profits. Other things do other things.
2) Figuring out how to measure the productivity of an open source project from a single perspective is a positive thing. We know that the externalities of the large profile, well-funded, open source projects feed back into their participating parties positively, from those funding them to those participating out of pure interest. Some of the big companies can even account for this in some way, but we also know that it's hard to fully account for the benefit.
One explanation for why a company might fund open source, given to me by someone working for Microsoft to the end of funding open source projects, is that open source generates the highest degree of reusable code. My guess is that allowing disparate interests to define a thing will net you a more nuanced definition than otherwise. Time preference will always be a thing though. Often you need to be fast more than you need to be correct.
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".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".
n00b here. Can someone explain to me how this works. I imagine a good developer is fairly expensive, so letting them do something unrelated to there job must be pretty expensive. How does this make business sense?
For example, web hosts like GoDaddy do a fair amount of contribution to WordPress because they host a lot of WordPress sites and their customers will keep renewing their web hosting if WordPress is excellent and secure.
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.)
A more meaningful measure is how quickly you can resolve a problem with open-source for X amount of investment, versus other options. With that, if a package doesn't do what you want then investing nothing appropriately yields NO return; whereas, investing certain amounts of time (asking questions, filing bugs, etc.) may yield more return, and fixing it yourself may yield the most.
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…
> I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially 1) Why on Earth would a company spend a considerable amount of resources on doing something that isn't good for them financially? That's their thing, and in the whole scheme of things seems like good separation of concerns. Companies make profits. Other things do other things. 2) Figuring…
For instance: I gladly pay more for a book directly from O'Reilly because they don't have DRM on their ebooks. It's not that they're getting any direct freebies or savings from not doing DRM, it's that I look at the freer-as-in-libre product and think it's just a more valuable thing for me to buy. Same with software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".
n00b here. Can someone explain to me how this works. I imagine a good developer is fairly expensive, so letting them do something unrelated to there job must be pretty expensive. How does this make business sense?
So really the debate here is not "do you hire an engineer full time or not?" it's "do you allow the output of that engineer to be open source or not?"
There's also a perk for the engineer: they work on stuff they can publicly point to as their portfolio full-time. Want to see me code? I don't necessarily have to have a bunch of side-projects on Github. Go check out the JIRA for these huge features I worked on!
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.