Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)
$2k&#x2F;year per technical employee is likely more than is paid to commercial licenses per technical employee. At these prices open source would cease to be of value.<p>I work with a few companies with ~50 tech employees each. Both use significant commercial tooling. Both pay far less than $100k a year for it. If their use of open source (some scattered linux, but everyone has also a Windows PC and&#x2F;or a Mac, etc.) cost them $100k a year, they&#x27;d both drop all of it and move to cheaper commercial solutions.<p>Pick a field. Pick commercial tools that a technical person in the field uses. Check prices spread over the lifetime of the tool.<p>Not even close.<p>Art people - $2k&#x2F;yr buys a lot of solid software that open source doesn&#x27;t come close to.<p>Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling.<p>CAD - Open source doesn&#x27;t even have an answer here.<p>Finance - Open source sucks here too.<p>Scientific computing - Matlab&#x2F;Mathematica&#x2F;etc - open source not close, $2k a year buys all your tooling over the lifetime of the tools.<p>And so on....<p>The reason I use some open source solutions is because they&#x27;re adequate for the needs, and the cost reflects it. Had I needed to pay $2k a year for them, I&#x27;d have dropped them and bought decent commercial alternatives.