> To reproduce all widely-used OSS once (e.g., the idea of OSS still exists, but all current OSS is deleted and needs to be coded from scratch), using programmers at the average developer wage from India, it would require an investment of $1.22 billion. In contrast, if we use the average developer wage from the United States, then reproducing all widely-used OSS would require an investment of $6.22 billion. Using a pool of programmers from across the world, weighed based on the existing geographic contributions to OSS as discussed above, would lead to an investment somewhere in between the low and high-income country, $4.15 billion.
Note that they just assume that you can basically hire programmers to type that out and extrapolate from lines of code. So I'm guessing this is off by at least one order of magnitude.
Granted, I'm not sure if I have a better option, but I'd probably start with sampling OSS contributors to figure out how much time they actually devote to OSS.
> To reproduce all widely-used OSS once (e.g., the idea of OSS still exists, but all current OSS is deleted and needs to be coded from scratch), using programmers at the average developer wage from India, it would require an investment of $1.22 billion. In contrast, if we use the average developer wage from the United States, then reproducing all widely-used OSS would require an investment of $6.22 billion. Using a pool of programmers from across the world, weighed based on the existing geographic contributions to OSS as discussed above, would lead to an investment somewhere in between the low and high-income country, $4.15 billion.
Note that they just assume that you can basically hire programmers to type that out and extrapolate from lines of code. So I'm guessing this is off by at least one order of magnitude.
Granted, I'm not sure if I have a better option, but I'd probably start with sampling OSS contributors to figure out how much time they actually devote to OSS.
Paper is here for the curious: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...