Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Black Duck: Full open source software may cost $387B

By Mass High Tech staff

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Black Duck Software Inc., a Waltham-based company with the largest database of open source software, has estimated the total cost of full open source software development at $387 billion. The cost projection stems from an announcement made Tuesday in a company analysis called, “Estimating the Cost to Reproduce OSS.”

The $387 billion estimate includes the reproduction of more than 200,000 open source software projects online, with more than 4.9 billion lines of code. The amount of open source software equates to more than two million developer years, the company said.

Black Duck explained in its analysis that open source software could help ease business costs by cutting down on “reinventing the wheel.” The company said the development costs of redundant work, roughly 10 percent of total development in the U.S., represents about $22 billion that could be saved through open source software.

Founded in 2002, Black Duck’s offering is designed to mitigate legal, security and management challenges associated with the use of open-source software through a hybrid development process that combines open-source software with internally developed and third-party code.