Open-source software has an economic value of 8.8 trillion US dollars. Without open-source programs, companies would have to spend around 3.5 times more money on software. This is according to a study by Harvard Business School. Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide. In addition, open-source software is included in 96 percent of all codebases.
Open-source development costs over four billion US dollars
Because open-source applications are mostly free of charge and their usage figures can only be measured to a limited extent, their value could not be determined from the product of price and sales. Instead, the researchers calculated the supply value, which describes the costs of developing new open-source programs. On the other hand, they calculated the demand value. This describes the costs that would be incurred by companies if they had to develop every open-source application themselves.
According to the researchers' calculations, the supply value is 4.15 billion US dollars. In contrast, the demand value is 2000 times higher at 8.8 trillion US dollars. In comparison, global expenditure on software in 2020 amounted to around 3.4 trillion US dollars. In addition, around five percent of developers account for around 93 percent of the supply value and 96 percent of the demand value. According to the authors of the study, this uneven distribution is the result of a small number of developers using numerous repositories.
Companies strongly demand open-source tools in Go
The researchers also examined the commercial value of different programming and markup languages. The Go language, for example, has an offer value of around 803 million US dollars. It is followed by JavaScript with 758 million US dollars, Java with 658 million US dollars and C with 406 million US dollars. Although Python is the second most popular language on GitHub, its supply value is only 55 million US dollars. On the demand side, Go has the highest value at more than five trillion US dollars, which is more than four times higher than JavaScript in second place.
To determine the use of open-source software in companies, the researchers use two different data sets. One of them identifies the open-source code that is incorporated into companies' products. The second data set shows the code that is available on the companies' websites. However, the data does not include all open-source projects. The researchers did not record open source operating systems. To calculate the economic value, the authors of the study used salary data from the 30 countries with the highest user shares on GitHub.
In their study, the researchers point out that open-source software is a modern common good. They warn against overuse and urge companies to contribute to the development of open-source programs themselves, considering their economic value. They also believe that political decision-makers have a duty to promote open-source projects. Most recently, Max Mehl from DB Systel also discussed the value of open source in commercial software development at the FOSS Backstage Conference.
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