Re: source mgt. requirements solicitation

[Tom Lord <lord at emf dot net>]

	GCC: 

	Total Estimated Cost to Develop 	= $ 66,377,705

	LK:

	Total Estimated Cost to Develop 	= $ 144,911,083


and:

	(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).


(That's an appallingly low average salary, btw., and a needlessly
large overhead.  If we're thinking of a nearly 20 year average, maybe
it's not _too_ badly removed from reality, but it's not a realistic
basis for planning moving forward.)

Someone did a sloccount run on a bunch of my 1-man-effort software,
developed over about 10 calendar years, and the person-years count was
surprisingly accurate.

In general, there is something of a business crisis in the free
software world.  It's particularly noticable around businesses based
on linux distributions.

Those distributions represent a huge amount of unpaid work.
Businesses using them got some free help bootstrapping themselves into
now favorable positions.  So, not only did they get the unpaid work
for free (as in beer), they traded that for favorable market positions
that raise the barrier of entry to new competitors.  While in theory
"anyone" can start selling their own distro, in reality, there's only
a few established companies and investors with deep pockets who have
any chance in this area.

So what's the crisis?  Well, those freeloaders aren't exactly being
agressive about figuring out how to sustain the free software movement
with R&D investment.  Companies spend a little on public projects,
sure, but you can count the number of employees participating,
industry wide, on the fingers of a few 10s of people and (total,
industry-wide) corporate donations to code-generating individuals and
NPOs with no more than 7 significant digits per year.  When they do
spend on public projects, it is most often for very narrow tactical
purposes -- not to make the ecology of projects healthier overall.  In
significant proportions, they spend R&D money on entirely in-house
projects that, while rooted in free software, benefit nobody but the
companies themselves.

You know, it's easy to make a few quarters for your business unit when
you, in essence, cheat.

So the crisis is that in the medium term, as engineering businesses
go, these aren't sustainable models.  And when they start leading
volunteers and soaking up volunteer work for their own aims, and
capturing mind-share in the press, one has to start to wonder whether
they aren't, overall, doing more harm than good.  And then there's
some social justice and labor issues....

Bill Gates, when he says that free software is a threat to innovation,
is currently correct.  UnAmerican?  You bet!

And, btw, surprise!: In the free software world, corporate GCC hackers
are the relative fat cats.  Go figure.


-t