April 15th, 2009
The $22 billion open source stimulus package
Black Duck says U.S. businesses can save $22 billion per year simply through re-use of open source software.
While Matt Asay likes the Black Duck release’s bigger number, $387 billion in equity value for all open source code, it’s the potential savings from re-use I want to focus on. After all, we can get it every year and it’s growing.
While $22 billion may not seem like a big number, placed against the $787 billion stimulus package signed in February, it’s still serious coin.
It’s more than six times the amount of money New York City got in the bill. It’s seven times the equity value of Red Hat. It’s over half what Bill Gates is worth following the stock market crash.
Of course it’s not real money. In order for you to get your piece of this stimulus, you have to make maximum use of open source software in your operations. You have to do more than download. You have to put the software to work.
Which means you need to join the open source community in a major way, and be ready to exchange the “precious bodily fluid” of code, and code knowledge, with other folks. Including your competitors.
Given how today’s tea bag protesters are calling the President and his supporters Socialist (or worse) for raising tax rates to Clinton-era levels, and keeping deficits at Bush-era levels for some time to come, how would they react to this?
Once they recognized what must be done to secure the money? (The video is from Ukranian Andrewf403, posted on YouTube last September. I figured it was a family-friendly, non-political illustration of knowledge gained with a tea bag.)
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/15/09
