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Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

The method in the paper definitely seems flawed: if, for example, PostgreSQL would not exist, that doesn't mean every software company would be developing their own RDBMS -- the much more likely effect would be more mega-yachts for Larry Ellison...

I'm not even sure there is a sensible method to quantify the economic impact of Open Source, since it's pretty much an "alternate universe" situation. Without OSS, Linux would most likely not exist, meaning that... everyone would be paying for Unixware per-seat licenses? Which would probably make AWS a nonstarter, etc. etc. On the other hand, there would most likely be a lot more profitable small software companies, but not enough to make up the difference.

So, "Open Source is a good thing, economically" might be a defensible statement, but putting an actual Dollar value on that will always be more fiction than science.

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Yeah, it's weird. "How would people behave if everything was different?"

I don't see how there's either $5 VPS or Heroku free tier in a world without free Linux on commodity hardware, and I'd argue that without those, software would have taken a much smaller bite out of the world than it has over the past 15-20 years.

One thing I know is that all the companies I've worked for in my 10-year career would not have been possible to start the way they did without open source software. First of all, they all had a period of at least a year where they were just an idea and built up an MVP for no cash. If license costs had been significant, who knows how that would played out.

Second of all, throughout my career a significant portion of my coworkers have been self-taught. Actually, everyone has, to some degree, even the people with actual CS degrees have run stuff for fun. And for everyone, that's depended on license-free software, no money to install and free to mess with. If this had come with a price tag or other limitations, maybe we'd've done something else on our Tuesday nights instead.

When I started my career Linux and FreeBSD weren't as good as they are now. People we're not playing around with them nearly as much. So UNIX experience was hard to come by, and the big players like SCO, Sun, SGI, etc were really the only game in town. When Linux got good suddenly finding people with UNIX experience became A LOT easier. This also had the effect of decreasing the value of UNIX experience and all those people who had learned on big company UNIXes were now competing with kids who had learned UNIX systems from messing about with Linux.

> it's pretty much an "alternate universe" situation

Yup. In the early days, hardly anyone paid for software (as such); when you paid for your mainframe, the software, complete with source, was bundled. You also got training, and engineers to help you use the thing. When hardware became cheap, everyone and his dog started writing software, just to learn (or play) with the new hardware.

It's very hard to envisage a scenario where cheap, powerful machinery can't spawn a community of hackers producing free (or very cheap) applications. If your counterfactual scenario contains internal contradictions, it isn't really possible to draw useful conclusions about how that scenario might develop.

Sure, but the point of the HBS paper isn't to paint a realistic picture. It's to imagine a hypothetical world where OSS doesn't exist, in order to derive a monetary value of its worth.

I agree with this article that the actual values might not be realistic, but it's a good thought exercise that highlights the importance of something most of us take for granted. Arguing about the methodology used to arrive at those numbers is missing the point, IMO.

Looking at hardware might be a good way to see how the "alternate universe" plays out. Hardware isn't free and can't be infinitely copied. So if you want to be a self-taught EE there's a certain minimum financial barrier to entry (like you have to buy FPGAs and breadboards and soldering irons and so on). There are far fewer hardware hackers around probably as a result.

This alternate universe already exists. Many companies out there writing software in Microsoft C#, deploying on Microsoft Windows, querying Microsoft SQL Server.

Most common server target for new deployments in .NET is Linux and PostgreSQL is a very popular DB choice to accompany those.

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