[Insight-developers] Wasting a Trillion dollars a year...

[Luis Ibanez]

"...Multiple industry analysts have estimated the global spend for
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at 3.4 trillion US
dollars per year. A lot of money (***)."


"The shocking part of that number is that it can be argued that one
trillion US dollars a year are being wasted either on applications that
are abandoned before they ever go into production, or spent on
applications that are missing key features or are late to the point of
interrupting operational capability or both."


"To give you an example, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 a company called
Coverity, which does software defect detection, analyzed the average
number of defects per thousand lines of code in *proprietary* software
and compared it to *open source* software. The average, which has
remained consistent, is that proprietary software contains 20-30 defects
per thousand lines of code."


"When they first measured the Linux kernel back in 2004, the kernel
consisted of 5.3 million lines of source code. (For comparison, Windows
XP is reported to weigh in at around 35 million lines of code.) If Linux
were industry average, one would expect between 100,000 and 150,000 bugs
or defects across 5.3 million lines of code, and yet the Coverity
scanners were only able to find 985."


"The Linux community got the report and published a message saying,
“Hey, there's only 985 bugs to look at, let's clean this up!” Within
*six months*, *every single* defect that the community felt was
legitimate was corrected. By contrast, if Microsoft wrote industry
average code, their 35 MLOC code base would contain more than 7 million
defects! You can see the problem."


"In 2005, Coverity remeasured the Linux kernel, which had grown to 5.7
million lines of code, and found that the defect density had actually
decreased. So some people wondered if maybe the Linux kernel was not a
fair test. Maybe something in the water makes the Linux kernel people
off-the-charts smart. So they looked at 32 other open source
applications, ranging from the PHP scripting language to the GNU C
compiler, and what they found was:


          that the *worst* of these 32 open source
          programs was only 50 *times better* than
          the average proprietary software."



"In both the proprietary and the open source cases, Developer 1 did
approximately 20% of everything. If it were true that software worked
according to industrial logic, any of the programs could have been
produced by five developers. But of course we know that's not true.
When you look at the graph, five developers get you to about 40% of
everything. When you get out to 10-15 developers, you climb up to about
75-80% of everything."


"It turns out that in the proprietary world, project size tended to be
about 25-35 developers, and projects exhibited what we call a “short
tail.” .... Well, with Apache back in 2001, they had *388* developers.
You do see the characteristics of the short tail up through about 10-15
developers, but after that you get this incredibly long tail out to
Developer 388. What the paper argues is that this “long tail of
participation” leads to more features, implemented sooner with fewer bugs.



"...If we go back to the fact that we're wasting a trillion dollars a
year, and look at the fact that the proprietary development model is
causing every proprietary developer to put themselves into a special
class of hell by being forced to put falsehoods into their own code
rather than dealing directly with the subject, I think it explains a lot
of what has been observed by open source software customers like

              * the New York Stock Exchange and
              * the National Security Agency.


Namely,
that open source software is better, faster and cheaper because at the
core it works and can be fixed.


What you hear in the proprietary world is, “You can't fix it. Maybe
we'll fix it, maybe we won't. Depends on how we feel.”


In the open source world, the mantra is, “If anybody can fix it,
somebody will.” What is fantastic about the open source community is
that “anybody” does not mean “anybody at Red Hat” but anybody in the
community of multiple millions of developers. When you look at the
quality comparisons, it is obvious that the network effect has come into
common use."


...


"We have a terrible problem in that we've been developing software the
wrong way for 40 years. One out of three dollars are wasted, and yet can
you imagine a manufacturing company discarding 33% of their products? "



“Transformation is everybody's job.” Open source provides a model where
“everybody” can be interpreted to mean literally everybody. Not
everybody on the shift or everybody at that company. The whole world.
Developer 388 sees a singular problem with Apache and fixes it because
he or she saw it. When you integrate that over everybody, you get a
system that is asymptotically approaching perfection with respect to
defect rates."


"My take ... is that 85% of all break-through innovation comes from
users, not vendors, and open source is a way to harness the 5/6ths of
the world sidelined by proprietary software models."



                                       Michael Tiemman




- Vice President, Open Source Affairs at Red Hat
- President of the Open Source Initiative
- President of the GNOME Foundation


http://opensolutionsalliance.org/osa/osaalert(apr09)-tiemann.html?x_lf_kt=2&_x_lf_kvid=b63e6e94-dd3f-4d5f-905b-9ea79a559ad8

Summary from the Keynote Addres -
"Exonovation - Leveraging Innovation from the Edge"
presented at the "Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise" conference
http://phillyemergingtech.com/sessions.php
March 2009

Full presentation PDF available at:
http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-ExonovationTieman.pdfhttp://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-ExonovationTieman.pdf


----------

*** NOTES:

    As a reference:
    US GDP is close to:  $14 Trillion.
    US Federal budget:    $3 Trillion.



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2001: The Standish Group Estimated $78B/year wasted on “Bad Software”
2002: NIST Estimated $60B/year lost in US alone due to “software bugs”
2002: Net profits of Fortune 500 is approximately $68B
2003: US Federal IT budget set at $59B,
       History suggests 80% will be wasted, not deployed
2003: Cost of Worms and Viruses alone range $17B-$55B