Open Source Code worth US$ 387 Billion

Black Duck Software (news, site) recently released a report stating that, by their calculations, the development cost of open source software is US$ 387 Billion. That's roughly half of the US stimulus bill.

Contributing to this value are over 200,000 open source projects with over 4.9 billion lines of code. Not only is all of this work worth a staggering amount in terms of dollars, it's also worth around two million developer years.

That's a lot of code. That's a lot of code that, since it's open source, you can incorporate into your own projects. In fact, Black Duck estimates that 10% of IT application development spending goes toward duplicating open source efforts.

Companies who instead turn to the open source code base could save US$ 22 Billion a year.

For more information, see the Black Duck paper "Estimating the Development Cost of Open Source Software."

Interested in what this all means for the world of Content Management Systems? See for our interview with Peter Vescuso, Black Duck's EVP of Marketing and Business Development.