Provides a comprehensive financial model for the TCO of open-source software, accounting for bug fixing, legal review, and license obligation management.
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a single major open-source component (e.g., a 3-million-line-of-code framework) is estimated at $135,498 over five years. Annual recurring expenses include $20,640 for internal bug fixing (even assuming 99% community coverage), $1,720 for license obligations such as attribution UIs and source code requests, $1,038 for mandatory legal checks, and $1,500 for compliance scanning subscriptions. These figures are based on a standard developer cost of $688 per day. One-time setup costs for establishing flashing toolchains and license lists add another $11,000, illustrating that the acquisition cost of 'free' software is offset by significant unbudgeted maintenance and compliance liabilities.
The guide identifies implementing license obligations as a mandatory cost that 85% of audited codebases fail to manage correctly.
legal liability and the potential loss of product distribution rights due to undisclosed third-party components
failing to detect missing or incompatible licenses creates an unquantified legal liability that can jeopardize the entire business model.
Only 30% of the original code remains after 5 years... the rest has been refactored, upgraded, repaired or replaced.
Risk Guard provides risk scores but does not estimate the 'Unbudgeted Maintenance Cost' of a component over its expected 5-year lifecycle.
Risk Guard would be better if it used the Qt TCO model to provide an 'Estimated 5-Year Ownership Cost' for a selected package.