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History: Constructive Cost Model COCOMO

Preview of version: 22

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

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 50-100 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):
0.2 M: https://www.openhub.net/p/wikisuite/estimated_cost
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


Openfire

Jitsi Meet

ClearOS

Syncthing


over 9500 commits

Elasticsearch


44000 commits

Kibana

Kimchi

FusionPBX

FreeSWITCH

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.

Overall

Even if we exclude dependencies (which is debatable), and not coun

History

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Marc Laporte 64
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Marc Laporte Fixed 63
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Marc Laporte Add a section: But adding up these figures is way more than $50 million (a fair question) 62
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Marc Laporte Changing because it's currently broken 61
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M. Bilal Siddiq 60
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M. Bilal Siddiq 59
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Marc Laporte 58
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Marc Laporte 57
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Marc Laporte Thanks luci! 56
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gary.cunningham-lee Fixed an error I introduced; changed large-figure format (to use comma). 55
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gary.cunningham-lee Some edits for general readability, etc. 54
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Marc Laporte 53
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Marc Laporte Links are above 39
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Marc Laporte Addressing reasonable questions 32
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