[ChrisLomont]

$2k/year per technical employee is likely more than is paid to commercial licenses per technical employee. At these prices open source would cease to be of value.

I work with a few companies with ~50 tech employees each. Both use significant commercial tooling. Both pay far less than $100k a year for it. If their use of open source (some scattered linux, but everyone has also a Windows PC and/or a Mac, etc.) cost them $100k a year, they'd both drop all of it and move to cheaper commercial solutions.

Pick a field. Pick commercial tools that a technical person in the field uses. Check prices spread over the lifetime of the tool.

Not even close.

Art people - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software that open source doesn't come close to.

Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling.

CAD - Open source doesn't even have an answer here.

Finance - Open source sucks here too.

Scientific computing - Matlab/Mathematica/etc - open source not close, $2k a year buys all your tooling over the lifetime of the tools.

And so on....

The reason I use some open source solutions is because they're adequate for the needs, and the cost reflects it. Had I needed to pay $2k a year for them, I'd have dropped them and bought decent commercial alternatives.

[whit537]

Per-user closed-source software cost for other technical fields is an interesting comparison. Thanks for surfacing it. :^)

Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend, the second two are no-ops since you don't give a number, and the fifth case is unclear to me (a quick check of Matlab shows a $2k perpetual license with some fine print about support contracts, or an $860/yr annual license).

To your secondary point: the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist, if our companies can become self-enlightened enough to fund them. Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. :)

[ChrisLomont]

>Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend

How so? Annually? Nowhere I know spends that per employee in (software) tooling.

Here's the first 2 you mention as reinforcing $2k as reasonable spend:

Art people - Photoshop creative 600/yr, and there is nothing close to it in opensource at any price. Many creatives don't need all of ps, only a piece or two, much cheaper. OS is order of $100, lasts 5 years easily. Or maybe they're doing high end video editing in DaVinci Resolve, again with nothing even close in open source, for $295, again good for many years. Some artists will use a few tools, but then again many places also have floating licenses.

Software dev: OS again $100, lasts 5 years easily. VS Pro 2019 $499, again many places keep a version about 5 years. So far we're at $120/yr for a significant amount of dev tooling. Again, some people use multiple paid for tools (say Resharper, etc.) but many don't. And again, lots of commercial tools have floating licenses to lower costs.

Care to detail an annual software spend approaching $2k for either of these fields you claim provides reinforcement for that amount being a reasonable spend? I'd be curious how you spend $2k/yr for the average developer using commercial tooling.

>the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist

Actually, it points to open source being unable to meet market demand. That there is no CAD system comparable to a professional CAD tool, despite there being CAD tools for over 60 years, and despite it being a huge market, shows that open source simply cannot compete for many markets. This is true is nearly all products except a tiny few: Linux is a good OS, a few good web stacks, thunderbird, etc. But it sucks for the vast majority of product categories used by professionals.

For CAD, basic SolidWorks is $4K, is insanely powerful, and a version easily lasts many, many years. And it has floating licenses.

>Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't.

I prefer to work for companies that apply the best tools for the job. If the tools are open source, so be it. If they're closed source, so be it.

It's fine to raise money to fund open-source, it's fine to make closed source and sell it. Offering something for free, then calling it mooching when someone uses it for free, is simply childish emotional blackmail.

[whit537]

> solid software that open source doesn't come close to

> Open source doesn't even have an answer here.

> Open source sucks here too.

> open source not close

> But it sucks for the vast majority of product categories used by professionals.

This is all irrelevant to me. Companies should pay for the open source software they use today, not for the bad and non-existent alternatives that they don't.

> Offering something for free, then calling it mooching when someone uses it for free, is simply childish emotional blackmail.

Meh. As my kids would say, "That sounds like a you problem." :D

Just because open source maintainers legally allow companies to mooch doesn't mean they're not mooching. ;)

But I mean don't get me wrong, maintainers can be a whiny bunch sometimes for sure. ;)

> open source being unable to meet market demand

Open source software is a public good, and markets are so bad at efficiently provisioning public goods that this is in fact their text-book failure mode:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketfailure.asp

In other words, _of course_ Photoshop trounces GIMP. Use Photoshop, by all means! :D

But! What if we can evolve our markets? That's the macro opportunity here:

1. A critical mass of companies voluntarily pay for the open source software they use today. This is primarily in developer tooling as you point out (Linux, web frameworks, etc.).

2. Existing open source projects become more professional, by which I mean they get better at things besides coding, like design, sales, support, management, etc.

3. Software other than developer tools starts to be built as open source. This depends on the first two things happening.

Why is this interesting? To me it's interesting because it's a slight glimmer of a real opportunity to decouple work from employment, so that individuals can work collaboratively more out of intrinsic motivation than for a paycheck. This doesn't solve all the world's problems and doesn't come without its own challenges, but I think it's an interesting and generally positive evolution of society that is fun to be a part of. :)

[edit - formatting]

[whit537]

> either of these fields you claim provides reinforcement for that amount being a reasonable spend

My statement was based on these two statements of yours:

> Art - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software

> Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling

I read that and thought, "Okay, well, I want a lot of solid software, so $2k/yr ... check!" I guess that's not what you intended. :)

> Care to detail an annual software spend approaching $2k for either of these fields

In any field, the approach I would take is to think about the SaaS products that a professional uses, because that's where the bulk of the software spend is these days. In software dev we have things like GitHub, Bitbucket, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Logrocket, AWS, GCP, Vercel, Figma, Canva, Slack, Discord.

I spot-checked GitHub, and their enterprise tier is $21/user/month or $252/user/yr:

https://github.com/pricing

Slack is $150/user/yr for business, so enterprise is probably 2x that ~= $300/user/yr:

https://slack.com/pricing

Seems like at Salesforce $300/yr is the low end, and they go up to $3600/user/yr(!):

https://tech.co/crm-software/salesforce-pricing-how-much-doe...

Let's say the average enterprise SaaS login is $250 or $300/yr. Six or eight of those gets us to $2k/user/yr, and six or eight SaaS logins seems pretty reasonable to me.

Note that in the OP blog post the 2k/user/yr number is arrived at from the top down, not from the bottom up as we're doing here. What I'm interested in in this thread is cross-checking the order of magnitude ... so far this thread confirms for me that 2k/user/yr is probably in the right ballpark for large companies to spend on their open source dependencies.

It doesn't sound like you or I have the expertise to go much further down this line of questioning. I'm sure people who control IT budgets at large companies have visibility into their average annual per-user software spend. It would be interesting to hear their view. :^)

[edit - formatting]

[ChrisLomont]

When at every turn you pick the priciest options, you see why I find it not realistic to claim companies pay what you think they would. Especially for sub-par open source things.

> GitHub, and their enterprise tier is $21/user/month

Github has a $4/month pricing plan. The companies I deal with all use internal source control, paying zero to github.

>Slack is $150/user/yr for business,

Of the 4 corporate slack channels I am art of, only one is paid, using the 6.67/mo/user version, for $80/person/yr. So on average these 4 run $20/user/year.

Want more data? Here's [1] Stackoverflow 2020 developer report. Half report using Slack. If that are like my experience, then maybe 1 in 4 uses paying, and maybe that's the low tier. If that still holds, 1 in 8 devs from StackOverflow (which is a very select group) is paying for Slack.

>Salesforce

Wait, what? Are you claiming every dev needs Salesforce? I know precisely zero with it, and I run a decent amount of seminars across multiple companies. Are you a developer that uses Salesforce regularly? This makes no sense to me whatsoever.

And then you throw in some vague SaaS products, needing to get to 6 or 8? Go ahead and tell me which 6-6 Salesforce style SaaS things the average dev uses.... It will be interesting to see what you pick.

So sorry, it seems you're more than just making stuff up, picking the highest values at each choice, to try to justify the prices.

>It doesn't sound like you or I have the expertise to go much further down this line of questioning.

I work directly under the owner and VP of tech in one company, for which I've been doing so for almost two decades, and have known a decent amount of their their finances for a long time. I also have talked at length with the Pres, VP, and head of HR at the other company I regularly work with. I own a profitable company for over 15 years now. All of these are heavily software dev houses. I have a decent number of friends that own dev companies or are high enough up to know the answer to this, and I've regularly asked them how their internal cost structure breaks down, mostly to compare to mine and to refine my understanding of how company finances work. I'm pretty sure I have decent insight to how this works.

For the first I write the proposals to get new software in, I see the counts, I price options, for a large amount of the developers. I see the numbers there.

At the second, from talking to those who do exactly this, I am quite clear their rates and overhead is in line with what I expect from such companies. I could ask directly, but since I work with a lot of devs there and see the tooling, there's no need. $2k/dev/year is a ton of money.

At the third, since it's my company, I see every nickel. It's also no where $2k/dev/year. Buying hardware like 3d printers, laser cutters, PCs, etc., ups the per person spend, but even there it's amortized over people and time and still not likely 2k/person/year spend.

It sounds like I do have expertise in this area and you are missing it.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...