History: Constructive Cost Model COCOMO
Preview of version: 17
As of 2019, WikiSuite's cost to develop is between 50 and 100 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 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
- Plus 125 external dependencies, managed by Composer
- 1.2M downloads
- 350 code committers
- 68 000 commits
- x wiki page edits
- y printed pages on doc.tiki.org
Openfire
ClearOS
Syncthing
Elasticsearch
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.