SPUG: CPAN code worth $500M

Michael R. Wolf MichaelRWolf at att.net
Sun Aug 8 13:45:41 CDT 2004


CPAN == 5,000 person-years of work!!!!

Back-of-the-email-envelope-calculation....

    $100K/yr/programmer * 5,000 programmer-yrs == $500,000,000

500 million dollars!!!

WOW!!!!  Now that's standing on the shoulders of giants.  

Well, not all of it's useful, and some was created by non-giants. 

But still........

I'm not going to live long enough, or work with a big enough team to
reproduce even a small percentage of the good parts. There truly is no
longer an independent project or product -- it's all built on the
shoulders of the extended community.

It's sure got me interested. I'd be interested to compare that to the
value of some other products -- say VB, C++, C#, Oracle, Ruby, FORTH
-- in some kind of ranking like the "Fortune 500" list of software
projects. But, practically, there'd be too many variables to normalize
it in a reasonable dollars-to-dollars comparison. Alas.

Any way, use the 1/2 Billion dollar number when promoting Perl, and
CPAN to businesses. It's not the *cost* that they're interested in ($0
in this case), it's the value received that's more important.

================================================================

> CAN CA buy an open source movement?
> ADT Magazine - USA
> ... One recent study, for example, suggests that the Perl code on CPAN
> amounts to over 5,000 person-years of work. CA isn't asking for ...
> <http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9854>
> 
> This as-it-happens News Alert is brought to you by Google News (BETA)...
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
> Create another News Alert:
> http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en
> 
> Try Google News:
> http://news.google.com/



-- 
Michael R. Wolf
    All mammals learn by playing!
        MichaelRWolf at att.net




More information about the spug-list mailing list