OSS PING
Posted on 04/27/2009 1:31:07 PM PDT by N3WBI3
Open-source software is big business. For example, most of what Oracle is getting for it $7.4-billion purchase of Sun is open-source software. Thanks to a Linux Foundation study, we know that creating the Fedora 9 Linux distribution would have cost $11.5-billionin conventional software costs. So, given all that, what do you think OSS (open-source software) as a whole is worth? How's about $387-billion? That's the number that Black Duck Software came up with. Black Duck isn't an open-source ISV (independent software vendor). The Boston area company started as an IP (intellectual property) risk management and mitigation company, but has since grown into an open-source legal management firm. Since Black Duck was founded in 2002, the company has been tracking all known open source on the Internet According to their research, there are over 200,000 open-source projects representing over 4.9 billion lines of code. To create that code from scratch, Black Duck estimates that "reproducing this OSS would cost $387 billion and would take 2.1 million people-years of development." The company isn't pulling that number out of a hat. Black Duck's methodology looks iron-clad to me. The company used "Barry Boehm's widely accepted COnstructive COst MOdel (COCOMO), an algorithmic Software Cost Estimation Model that relates software development effort for a program, in person-years, to source lines of code (SLOC)." I've used COCOMO on consulting jobs, and it's a darn good tool. So, that's neat, but what does it really mean? Black Duck said "We estimate that 10% of US-based development, representing $22 billion, is redundant and could be offset using OSS, much of which can be reinvested for true innovation." 10%! That little!? I don't believe it.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.computerworld.com ...
OSS PING
(swoons) Oh, Barry!!!
I was reading that as sarcasm...
LOL!!
Most people don’t know what they are missing, then again most computer users only want to use it, not play with it.
Software is the razor, support contracts are the blades.
Hey speaking of Black Duck does anyone know how the medical examiner on NCIS (he used to be in “The Man From Uncle” I think) got his nickname: “Ducky”?
That is it? Dr. Mallard!
Ah, thank you so much for enlightening me!
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