[ricklamers]

It makes no sense to estimate the total cost of the proprietary equivalent of _all_ that is currently OSS at $177M. It would be spread over at minimum thousands of companies and each company would try to get their margin, needs to be rewarded for the risk they’re taking, etc.

The HBS method to get to 3.5X isn’t sensible (as the author points out, not everyone would build) but the truth is somewhere in-between.

The COGS of software would be significantly higher if there was no OSS. But everyone knows that already. I don’t think any new information has been created here.

[nirse]

I agree, if you think of just a few big OSS project, like Linux, Postgres, Sqlite, nginx or apache web server, run as proprietary companies each of those would easily be worth way more then $177M (for reference, nginx was sold for $670M in 2019).

[lloeki]

> It makes no sense to estimate the total cost of the proprietary equivalent of _all_ that is currently OSS at $177M

Right. I mean, I would guesstimate, say, sqlite alone to cost in the ballpark of that amount of money to develop from scratch in a proprietary way.

I mean, working from the initial hypothesis, if sqlite suddenly disappeared and someone starts a company aiming to develop and sell it, how much $$ would VCs throw at the project? How much at Rails? ext4/btrfs/zfs?

The latter gets interesting because Sun threw actual money at ZFS. Comparatively, how much money has, say, Apple spent on APFS? MS on NTFS? How much has been spent on Unix and its descendants?

Either I'm missing something, or that 177M for all of OSS just flat out doesn't add up.

[eviks]

It's in-between, but not in the middle

But if everyone knows, what's your estimate how much higher that would be? M, B, or T?