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Big investments in open source


By David Rubinstein
April 16, 2009 — 
Three-hundred eighty-seven billion dollars. That’s the estimate offered by intellectual property protection company Black Duck Software as to the cost of open-source software.

The company defines the cost of open source as how much money it would take to recreate all of it, based on an estimated 200,000 open-source projects and 4.9 billion lines of code. It also factors in developer productivity. Black Duck estimates it would take an investment of more than 2 million developers years to do.

“The open-source model, as done by Linux, Apache, JBoss and MySQL, has removed a lot of the fears and misperceptions regarding open source, and has brought barriers [to its use] way down,” said Peter Vescuso, Black Duck executive vice president of marketing and business development.

Along with placing an estimate on the cost of open-source software, Black Duck also calculated that U.S. companies could save more than US$22 billion a year through the reuse of open-source software in application development, Vescuso said. He explained that 10% of current spending on application development repeats what already exists in the open-source world, which translates into the figure the company derived.

By reusing open-source software, companies can free up funds for innovation, which Vescuso said financial experts say is the way out of recession. “Twenty-two billion is quite a lot of fiscal stimulus power,” he said.

Anecdotally, Vescuso said Black Duck surveyed developers at the SD West conference in March, and it found that 76% of the respondents were using the same or more open-source code in their projects, while only 12% were using less.

Vescuso pointed to social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and he made the point that all are built on open source. “No one would build something like this on a proprietary infrastructure,” he said. “It’s unthinkable."


Related Search Term(s): Black Duck, open source


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