Open Source: The Stealth Stimulus Package

If I asked you to account for your energy consumption, you might list your laundry equipment on the spreadsheet. We'd see how much you spend using your dryer each month -- quite a large amount. Worried by the cost, you might then opt for a clothesline in your yard. Naturally, your costs have gone down. But has your energy usage? You're actually consuming as much energy as before, but you may decide to omit it from your spreadsheet because you're no longer paying for it.

This tendency to account only for the resources we pay for and to ignore the value of the resources we don't is called "the clothesline paradox" (first coined by Peter van Dressler). It was also the subject of O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly's well-received keynote at the recent Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore.

O'Reilly highlighted the value of another public resource not included in balance sheet: America's economy in the 21st century has a profound dependence on open source software. However, in most corporate balance sheets, it's either passingly mentioned or, more often, forgotten entirely. Given it's not a cost, that's not surprising. But it also means we have no idea how valuable open source actually is.