Google Open Source’s Sophia Vargas published a study measuring the engineering effort of keeping copies of open source packages up to date inside Google, framing the work around the community saying that open source is free as in puppies rather than free as in beer. The report’s first question was how long it takes an engineer who is not an upstream maintainer to update a package at Google, and the second was whether complexity metrics can predict the relative effort. It found that most package updates take four hours or less, but a long tail stretches into days, weeks or months to fully land, and that local customization adds substantial cost; archived and stale packages were excluded. The post points readers to the full research report on the cost of maintaining a copy of an open source package.
How much does it cost to use open source software?
Google Open Source's Sophia Vargas published a study measuring the engineering effort of keeping copies of open source packages up to date inside Google, framing the work around the community saying that open source is free as in puppies rather than free as in beer. The report's first question was how long it takes an engineer who is not an upstream maintainer to update a package at Google, and the second was whether complexity metrics can predict the relative effort. It found that most package updates take four hours or less, but a long tail stretches into days, weeks or months to fully land, and that local customization adds substantial cost; archived and stale packages were excluded. The post points readers to the full research report on the cost of maintaining a copy of an open source package.
Source: Googleblog