The economic impact of open source
In this three minute excerpt from his talk at the 2007 Ubuntu Conference, MySQL CEO Marten Mickos estimates the productive power of the aggregate community of open source developers. His estimate is that there are 1.2 million full-time equivalent open source developers -- about 17 times the size of Microsoft. For comparison, he estimates that the software underlying today's information economy -- enterprise software, ATMs, government systems, etc. -- represents the work of a few hundred thousand developers, most of whom are white men who are over 40 today.