[jvanderbot]

As you say, whatever the real cost is, it's much higher than one that supposes every company could reproduce F/OSS. How amazing then, that even in this hypothetical universe where everyone could, we still wouldn't want to due to the enormous cost.

Providing a lower bound on value, and furthermore one that is astronomically high, is extremely useful as an eye-opener. This is a useful result for policy-makers.

[abtinf]

A plausible lower bound would be useful, but $4B is a joke. That’s less than the annual budget of single major university (Harvard is around ~$5-6B).

Gartner says the world spent $4.5T on IT in 2022. To pick some numbers out of thin air, let’s assume half of that is on software, and half of that is on new software (not maintenance). And the let’s assume that software is sold at ~20% net margin. And open source powers an enormous fraction of it at some level, but let’s be conservative and say it’s 10%. $4.5T * 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.8 * 0.1 = $90B per year just for the new stuff.

Recreating the existing stacks… if we multiple that number by 25 years, you are at over $2T to rebuild OSS in some kind of manhattan project.

But even that is a massive underestimate. For one, it would be competing with other development objectives—there aren’t millions of principle-level engineers just sitting idle. And more importantly, formally run projects have radically different levels of passion and “giving a shit” compared to how people often start OSS.

You simply couldn’t do it at all. It would be like asking “okay, but assuming we really had to replace all the metal with wood, what would it cost to launch a manned wooden rocket ship to the moon?”

[jvanderbot]

You are mis-reading the result. As quoted above:

> We then calculate the demand-side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist. We estimate ... that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion

But details like a 1000x change in estimate aside, saying it couldn't be done is not quantifiable. At least a dollar figure can be reasoned about.

[abtinf]

Saying it can’t be done is still an actionable guide to policy. If it can’t be done any other way, and it has massive benefit, then policymakers ought to be careful to avoid actions that harm it.

For example, tax law changes requiring multi-year depreciation of engineering labor probably have an extremely detrimental effect to small open source projects with commercial potential.

The policy effectively significantly raises working capital requirements for an early stage OSS company that might be focused on services revenue instead of licensing fees.

[jvanderbot]

We're missing the forest for the trees - the estimate was large ($5T), and the estimate is indeed a lower bound, and it seems like pretty damn important to save F/OSS.