If you’re interested in this topic, there’s a very good article on it. More software is open source than most people realise.
Nevertheless, companies still make money from it because a small portion is closed source, and because of customisations for customers, support, and the whole package. It’s the customisation and support for customers that generates revenue, not open source alone.
This is the case in many fields, though, whether it’s programming or the industry in general. Anyone can access individual components or code, but customising them comes at a cost. While a layperson could set up a server, they would struggle to tailor it precisely to a client’s needs.
In fact, there’s actually a lot of money involved in open source, because customizations can be really expensive. Customers are lured in with free software or savings on initial development costs, but then end up paying a lot for customisations. This has always been the case with Linux, for example: anyone can access it for free, but very few people can customise it.
- The Careful Consumption of Open Source Software
Open source software is everywhere today. A 2024 Synopsis report showed that 96% of the commercial code bases they sampled contained open source software, and 77% of the code within those code bases was open source. Similarly, a 2022 Linux Foundation study found that 70-90% of any given software code base is made up of open source components.
Here’s a real-world example from when I was be involved in large-scale projects: The project cost €200,000. Of that, €50,000 went towards hardware, €50,000 towards planning and €100,000 towards programming. Bear in mind that this wasn’t a new development, but a customisation.
A new printer? An industrial printer, for example, would cost €30,000 for programming alone. A calculator / maths program would cost €30,000. This may sound expensive, but it’s simply because a programmer is tailoring it precisely to the customer’s specifications. It’s the customer’s specifications that are expensive, not the calculator itself.
And you can probably imagine what kind of crazy requests customers have.
Although those are big numbers, unfortunately not much of it ends up going to the programmer; mostly goes to the company instead.