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by dabber 799 days ago
> Possibly because a developer hired to write something around usbip would cost a lot less. https://usbip.sourceforge.net/

Would it? For the sake of discussion, I'll assume "thousands of raspberry pi's" = 2,000 RBpis, or something around $10,000 in license fees.

I don't know anything about either project beyond the links shared by you and the root comment, but based on the information at each link and the assumption of $10,000 spend:

I would choose the one time cost of VirtualHere's purpetual update license and release cadence over a some short dev for hire contract to write some unmaintained wrapper code around a sourceforge library that hasn't been been touched in over a decade.

1 comments

$49 times 2,000 is $98,000, not around $10,000. Yet your argument still holds. There are many reasons for that.

1. You are paying a developer that works 100% on that, year after year, and not a hire that won't be there when something goes wrong in the future after an OS update, new hardware, anything. This is basically your argument. Let me add:

2. In some parts of the world far away from SV but still in the West, $100k are about two years of gross developer salary, not what the developer actually gets at the end of the month. Point 1 still holds. Where it's 10 years of salary maybe companies could be tempted by a custom solution.

3. You are giving $49 per server to that developer but you are probably getting more per server from your customers. If you have thousands of servers you probably have a viable business, so that's just yet another cost of doing business.

Hah, yes I definitely fumbled on the math there. Thanks for re-articulating what I was trying to get across much better than I did!