#Shiftit equivalent for windows for free#
#Shiftit equivalent for windows software#

#Shiftit equivalent for windows software#

Now this is probably not an accurate measure of the actual effort cost of developing free software (although I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess whether it's too high or too low), but it does provide an order-of-magnitude estimation and a consistent metric which allows for comparisons. These data are generated by David Wheeler's SLOCCount program, which uses COCOMO, a long-standing and fairly simple model, to estimate the costs of software projects under the assumptions of centralized, managed software development.

#Shiftit equivalent for windows for free#

There is a project being conducted by the LibreSoft Research Group to collect and analyze metrics data for free software projects based on 'source lines of code' ( SLOC), a relatively easy-to-measure statistic for any kind of software. Fortunately, this has largely already been done for us-in the form of Debian GNU/Linux, the world's most complete free software GNU/Linux distribution. Then there's deciding what is worth counting and what is just cruft. First of all, you have a hard time finding it all. Measuring the size of 'free software' is not easy. Unfortunately, that too is hard to count, though you can look at the figures for how many people are using free software.īut there is another way to ask the question: if you had to start from scratch and re-build the existing body of software, using a proprietary development company, how much would it cost you? At the very least, free software must be worth the effort that people are putting into it (or they'd stop working on it). Thus, use value is the relevant metric, not sale value. However, we don't value software for software's sake.

We don't value software for software's sake. In that case, proprietary software is a multi-billion dollar industry, so how can you even compare it to the free-licensed software industry which doesn't charge per-copy costs? First of all, it's tempting to say that software is 'worth what you charge'-that is to say, that you could evaluate it by its sale price.

It's difficult for people to compare the scale of free and proprietary products with each other.

The professionalist belief is that only paid professionals can produce quality, well-engineered designs and that professionals cannot possibly be paid to work on something you can get 'for free'. It's such a strongly held belief because it is all that conventional wisdom allows for works created by 'amateurs' in their 'spare time'. This may seem almost comic in the pages of Free Software Magazine, but I still hear this myth spouted by otherwise intelligent people in other communities. 'Free software development can create simple programs and utilities, but it's useless for anything large scale'