Big investments in open source

[LinuxMint-4]

Big investments in open source

http://www.sdtimes.com/BIG_INVESTMENTS_ ... URCE/33421


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.