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FOSS is Now Costing Software Vendors $60 Billion a Year in Annual Revenues, and It's Still Only 6% of the Global Spend

Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he’s been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment. That is the finding of the Standish Group, which after five years of research on open source has delivered a $1,000 report called “Trends in Open Source,” a study that finds that FOSS is now costing software vendors $60 billion a year in annual revenues, and it’s still only 6% of the global spend. Standish also says that if open source product and service were calculated at commercial prices, the open source initiative would be the largest software company in the world, outselling Microsoft, Oracle and Computer Associates combined. And if all its annual hours were added up and divided by the average workweek, the open source community would equate to the largest software employer in the world. Standish says the open source phenomenon has reached the “fashion” stage, meaning the market has reached maturity and general acceptance, After that comes commoditization.