It typically costs $13-$19 to develop a single line of debugged, documented and maintained software source code. Development organizations are increasingly turning to open source software which offers hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable software components which can be leveraged to slash development budgets by thousands or even millions of dollars. However, management, security and compliance issues related to open source software can introduce business risks that must be addressed. Manual processes for managing these risks incur significant costs - about $7800 annually per software component. These costs can negate the benefit of leveraging open source code.
This paper reviews the business case for automating the management of open source and provides recommendations for how to make open source an integral part of your software development operation while addressing business risks and compliance issues.
