[boberoni]

>"We first estimate the supply-side value by calculating the cost to recreate the most widely used OSS once.

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 the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist."

If programming is "theory building" [1], then OSS is sharing our theories of how to program computers. It makes sense that sharing our ideas is more valuable to the aggregate economy than keeping them secret.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf