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Open Source 1 Comment »Eran Strod
Director of Product Marketing
estrod@blackducksoftware.com
In a recent Back Duck survey, we found that companies doing software development are using significant amounts of open source software; about 22% of code was identified as originating from an OSS project.
The cost savings from strategic use of open source can free up precious software development resources and compress project schedules. To calculate how much, see the Black Duck ROI calculator.
Many developers and managers have anonymously used this calculator to help with the decision of whether to reuse existing software or write a software component from scratch. The calculator allows one to enter assumptions for different factors that affect this decision. For example, the average value input for the cost of a software developer was $79,000. This value varies by company and region. When companies compute the cost of a developer, they start with salary but add in other costs as well: benefits, overhead such as utilities and administration, and expenses such as dev tools and hardware. These costs typically add a significant uplift on top of salary. When the Linux Foundation published an estimation of the cost of developing Linux, they called this uplift the “wrap rate” and fixed it at 2.4 times salary. This figure originated from a well-known study by David Wheeler. With that in mind, the figure of $79,000 either represents salary only or reflects a lower cost region of the world not the major business centers in Europe and North America.
Additionally, people input 16,000 as the average number of finished lines of code produced by a developer in a year. This number happens to be much different than we would have expected. When you include architecture, design, debugging, QA, compliance and administration, the number of fully, tested, vetted code tends to be much less. The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon, estimated this value at about 20 lines of code per day (~4440 per year). Developers may not have been considering these other costs when using the calculator so the 16,000 figure probably reflects just the creation of new code.
With these caveats in mind we can start to look at the compelling economics of using open source. The average size application input was 363K lines of code. At the average level of salary and developer productivity noted above, it requires 22 developer years or $1.8M USD to create a 363 thousand line application from scratch.
I was recently talking to prospect who was digging very deeply into how hard it would be for his developers to “game” Protex, i.e. get some open source code and modify it to the point that it would not be found in a scan. In the end, he was convinced that the analysis performed by Protex is sufficiently sophisticated that gaming the system isn’t worth it. Fooling the tool requires as much work as writing the code from scratch. However to me, the bigger issue is a fundamental belief that given the chance people will generally try to do the right thing.
Everybody knows open source software is free, and many know it has other significant benefits for developers in productivity and enabling innovation, but there is no free lunch, as open source components are not free of obligations. Obligations around making enhancements available, attribution, use, the list goes on and your free lunch starts giving you indigestion.

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