The financial value of open source software

lemire.me

15 points·ibobev··6 comments

One of the problems I have with the analogy being made here is that most open-source projects were created because someone needed to solve a problem or do something to build something else. The other thing is that in software, more than anything else, it's usually okay to be imperfect or incomplete. An incomplete or imperfect drug is dangerous.

The other thing is that fundamentally OSS is a symbiotic relationship between creators, maintainers, and users. If I need to build a tool or tech for my own product, making it available to others gets me feedback, gets me ideas on how to improve it, hardens it, etc.

I don't believe the 1.2b euro number for how much it would cost a company to write the Linux kernel (and only the kernel) from scratch. We have many examples of small teams writing great kernels in a few years. Some in academia, some in hypercorps, and some in recovery from addiction:-). Not that Linux isn't great. I just think that estimate is misguided.

Aren’t device drivers compiled into the Linux kernel?

I would think that support alone would be worth more than 1.2B dollars in collective time spent ironing that out. I don’t really know but I am thinking their estimate is rather low for the cost to reproduce the Linux kernel.

Edit: missed the link to a paper for the estimate.

I've heard $5B+ estimates for development costs for fuchsia and it's barely made a dent on the market.

The goodness of a kernel is somewhat determined by how much people decide to use it.

The kernel is one thing, but then you have all the library support and distributions and community and so on.

There are good textbooks that you can download for free, but I don't know how good coverage is in different subjects.

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