LiMo white paper: Mobile open source economic analysis [LWN.net]

The LiMo Foundation has published an interesting white paper [PDF] on the economic value of working with the development community. "The cost of forking and losing connection with upstream development is twofold: i) the corresponding cost of presumed beneficial unleveraged potential, ii) the further cost of having to re-engineer modified forked code in the future to accommodate the inevitable eventual re-sync with upstream. We quantified the former to show that the figures run into $millions for important components such as GTK, WebKit, GStreamer and BlueZ." (By way of Dave Neary).

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LiMo white paper: Mobile open source economic analysis

Posted Sep 18, 2009 15:55 UTC (Fri) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]

It's a basic summing of contributions using the COCOMO counting method to see how much it would cost to develop certain projects from scratch - there's very little "analysis" there at all and most of the stats are from ohloh.net's monitoring of codebases.

And the basic gist is "a lot".

But then, anyone who can read past "the corresponding cost of presumed beneficial unleveraged potential" is probably going to find it interesting.

LiMo white paper: Mobile open source economic analysis

Posted Sep 19, 2009 7:06 UTC (Sat) by dneary (guest, #55185) [Link]

@ledow: The main point that Mal wanted to get across is that if you build a product or platform off old versions of software (GTK+, WebKit and GStreamer were not chosen by accident) you're missing out on new features and bug fixes, and they're worth a lot in active community projects. You're also going to have the pain of catching up & trying to merge you own fork into the newer version after 2 years of independent evolution, and this also costs a lot. Mal only puts a dollar figure (via COCOMO) on the delta between a fork point 2 years ago and now for the projects he examined. I thought it was interesting.