from Hacker News

Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars

by codeman001 on 3/21/25, 7:21 AM with 28 comments

• by zonkerdonker on 3/21/25, 7:28 AM

  Wow, killer of a first paragraph.

  >Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide. In addition, open-source software is included in 96 percent of all codebases.

  Not shocking to see the big guns coming hard at FOSS.

• by c0balt on 3/21/25, 7:51 AM

  That value and cost-factory is likely a higher multiple when talking about infrastructure. If everyone had to pay for Windows (or a similar OS) instead of Linux and numerous other systems (PostgreSQL, OpenLDAP, Nginx, ...) our costs for hosting services would move up at least an order of magnitude.

• by anonzzzies on 3/21/25, 9:17 AM

  We make future open source software; it becomes open source when we recouped our investments. It's the only way I found that works. If we never recoup them, then ok, we open source them too but that we don't tell anyone. And yes, we donate what we can to projects we use. But that's not a plan; unfortunately it doesn't work outside a few coffees for them if the project is substantial.

• by rvense on 3/21/25, 8:27 AM

  Sounds low. None of the companies I've worked for would have existed without open source.

• by shoo on 3/21/25, 9:18 AM

  The study appears to be this one from Jan 2024:

  Hoffmann, M., Nagle, F. and Zhou, Y., 2024. The value of open source software. Harvard Business School Strategy Unit Working Paper, (24-038).

  link to HBR summary (published March 2024): https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/open-source-so...

  link to the 2024 working paper [pdf]: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

• by feverzsj on 3/21/25, 7:45 AM

  And no company pays them enough to even cover the living expenses.