Open and closed source: better together
April 12, 2010
SIG calculates industry savings due to use of OSS
OSS and proprietary software are often pitted against each other as opposites. When overhearing the heated debates between advocates and detractors of OSS, one might come to believe that a choice must be made between them. Recent research by SIG shows a different perspective.
Analyst Miguel Ferreira of SIG explains: "When analysing proprietary software of our customers, we observed more often then not that open source components and libraries are used as essential building blocks." Intrigued by this apparent trend, Ferreira and his colleagues decided to investigate the use of OSS in proprietary systems. "Apparently, such reuse of OSS has economic benefits. But can those benefits be quantified?"
To answer this question, a set of over 300 proprietary software systems was analysed. The dependencies of these closed source systems on open source libraries were mapped out and an estimate was made of the savings obtained by reusing rather than developing these libraries from scratch. The average savings per proprietary system was estimated at 1.1 million EUR.
These estimates indicate that the efforts of the open source development communities have an important indirect economic impact on closed source development. Ferreira: "The availability of OSS libraries and components allows closed source development to be faster, cheaper, and more more ambitious".
You can find the report via the following link: