Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on March 12, 2007 09:15 PM
I would interpret the following quote - "~95% of code is still written in-house" - as indicating that 5% of code written is actually in development of "for sale" programs. If, of all the code written internationally, only 5% is actually proprietary contributing to a for sale program as the product then you may have got your ration backwards.
Though, read the paper for yourself; gaining more information is never a bad thing. It's from 1999 but I can't see the ratio of inhouse code to for sale programs changing greatly in that time.
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html" title="catb.org">http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaa<nobr>r<wbr></nobr> /magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html</a catb.org> (The Magic Cauldron)
"First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. In the pre-microcomputer era it used to be a commonplace that 90% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case—other industries are much more software-intensive now, and the finance industry's share of the total must have accordingly dropped—but we'll see shortly that there is empirical evidence that approximately 95% of code is still written in-house." (ESR 1999)
"This is called `maintenance', and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) writing or maintaining in-house code that has no sale value at all—a fact the reader may readily check by examining the listings of programming jobs in any newspaper with a `Help Wanted' section." (ESR 1999)
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uh, 90% of software developers?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 12, 2007 09:15 PMThough, read the paper for yourself; gaining more information is never a bad thing. It's from 1999 but I can't see the ratio of inhouse code to for sale programs changing greatly in that time.
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html" title="catb.org">http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaa<nobr>r<wbr></nobr> /magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html</a catb.org>
(The Magic Cauldron)
"First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. In the pre-microcomputer era it used to be a commonplace that 90% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case—other industries are much more software-intensive now, and the finance industry's share of the total must have accordingly dropped—but we'll see shortly that there is empirical evidence that approximately 95% of code is still written in-house."
(ESR 1999)
"This is called `maintenance', and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) writing or maintaining in-house code that has no sale value at all—a fact the reader may readily check by examining the listings of programming jobs in any newspaper with a `Help Wanted' section."
(ESR 1999)
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