Open Source Whitepaper updated for 2010

When I was invited to speak at the STS Forum in Kyoto in 2006, I thought it would be a good idea to write an extremely concise white paper-3 pages total-comparing and contrasting open source software and proprietary software. Since then I have been invited to speak about, defend, and expand upon that paper. Now it’s time to give it an update.

The paper is now 5 pages of text and 2 pages of references. It is still relatively concise, but the fact that the numbers keep showing double- and triple-digit improvements in important metrics (compared with proprietary software), I felt that it would only be fitting to expand the content and the data by a commensurate amount. The premise holds that proprietary software is responsible for a direct dead-loss costs of $1T USD per year, although it is enhanced by the analysis of Roger Sessions showing that the sum of direct and indirect costs are closer to $6T USD per year. Either way you slice it, in these economic times, we simply cannot afford the status quo of proprietary software dominance, either in the IT choices we make or in the economic and legal agendas that they promulgate.

Without further ado, here is a link to my OSS-2010.pdf whitepaper, How Open Source Software Can Save the ICT Industry $1 Trillion Dollars per Year. If you have more compelling data than I have found thus far, please contact me so that I can continue to update this report. Thank you!