WikiSuite | Constructive Cost Model COCOMO

As of 2019, WikiSuite's cost to develop is well over 50 million $USD.

Really?

Yes. If you tried to re-code WikiSuite using proprietary models. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO

How can it be free and who paid for this?

Like Wikipedia, GNU/Linux and Firefox, WikiSuite is the result of massive collaboration.

How do you arrive to "well over 50 million $USD"? Are you including the cost of GNU/Linux?

Nope. Just the Linux Kernel would cost billions to redevelop

The WikiSuite-specific code (mostly ClearOS installers):

This is intentionally as small as possible since we focus on upstreaming code to the various Software Components

The main software components:

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware

Plus 125 external dependencies, managed by Composer
1.2 million downloads
345 code committers
over 68 000 commits
over 48 000 messages on the developer's mailing list

Openfire

over 8500 commits

Jitsi Meet

ClearOS

over 18 000 commits

Syncthing

over 9500 commits

Optional components

Elasticsearch

44000 commits

Kibana

Kimchi

We won't count KVM as we consider it as part of GNU/Linux

FusionPBX

FreeSWITCH

Xibo

Isn't the figure exaggerated?

In some cases, it's actually underestimated. COCOMO counts the number of lines of code. But a project like Tiki has been in active development for over 16 years, and there has been over 68 000 code commits. This battle-tested code costs more to develop than an application that would have the same number of lines, but would cost less to develop.

The Tiki-specific code is at approximately $15M. But that doesn't even count the 125 external dependencies. Think about it. Each dependency represents a distinct community / code base / bug tracker / etc.

Ok, but I am not going to use all the features

That is true of all feature-rich software. But the economics don't make it feasible to build software just for your needs. Community Free / Libre / Open Source software will necessarily want to cater to a wider community and get more users and contributors.

Conclusion

Even if we exclude dependencies (which is debatable), and not count all the components, we can see that it's "well over 50 million $USD". This demonstrates the following:

Software development is expensive
WikiSuite components are feature rich as per Component criteria
Free / Libre / Open Source development models are fantastic, even if they are not always well understood. Please see this analysis from 2009: https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/so/2009/06/mso2009060004.pdf

Information	Version
2019-05-07 11:15 Marc Laporte	64	View
2019-05-01 10:24 Marc Laporte Fixed	63	View
2019-04-23 11:26 Marc Laporte Add a section: But adding up these figures is way more than $50 million (a fair question)	62	View
2019-04-23 08:48 Marc Laporte Changing because it's currently broken	61	View
2019-04-22 03:30 M. Bilal Siddiq	59 - 60	View
2019-04-10 09:19 Marc Laporte	58	View
2019-04-05 18:15 Marc Laporte	57	View
2019-02-13 20:21 Marc Laporte Thanks luci!	56	View
2019-02-07 09:18 gary.cunningham-lee Fixed an error I introduced; changed large-figure format (to use comma).	54 - 55	View
2019-02-06 20:24 Marc Laporte	53	View
2019-02-04 20:39 Marc Laporte	33 - 52	View
2019-02-04 17:17 Marc Laporte Addressing reasonable questions	32	View
2019-02-04 10:45 Marc Laporte	31	View
2019-02-04 02:34 Marc Laporte	17 - 30	View
2019-01-30 20:38 Marc Laporte	16	View
2019-01-30 14:12 Marc Laporte	15	View

History: Constructive Cost Model COCOMO

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