History: Constructive Cost Model COCOMO
Preview of version: 21
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
- 345 code committers
- over 68 000 commits
- over 48 000 messages on the developer's mailing list
Openfire
Jitsi Meet
ClearOS
Syncthing
Elasticsearch
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