Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:33:19 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:33:19 -0400 Received: from bitmover.com ([192.132.92.2]:60635 "EHLO mail.bitmover.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:33:17 -0400 Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:38:59 -0700 From: Larry McVoy To: "Henning P. Schmiedehausen" Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?] Message-ID: <20021010093859.A587@work.bitmover.com> Mail-Followup-To: Larry McVoy , "Henning P. Schmiedehausen" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20021005112552.A9032@work.bitmover.com> <20021007001137.A6352@elf.ucw.cz> <5.1.0.14.2.20021007204830.00b8b460@pop.gmx.net> <20021007143134.V14596@work.bitmover.com> <20021009165500.L27050@work.bitmover.com> <20021010080448.A17675@hq.fsmlabs.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i In-Reply-To: ; from hps@intermeta.de on Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 04:14:03PM +0000 X-MailScanner: Found to be clean Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2623 Lines: 47 On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 04:14:03PM +0000, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote: > yodaiken@fsmlabs.com writes: > > >But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" > >programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping. > > For small and medium companies (such as Siemens...), $50k (or the > rough aequivalent of EUR 50k) are already good developers salary. But that $50K is not the whole story. That's *unburdened*, it doesn't include any of the associated costs such as benefits, taxes, office space, expenses, etc. When I was at SGI I was making around $130K and I was pretty high up in the salary curve. At the time, their *average* burdened cost was $180K/engineer/year. There is no way that $130K was the average engineer salary, it was quite a bit lower than that, my guess would be around 90 or 100. You're looking at all this from the typical engineer perspective. That's not a reasonable perspective at a company of any size. Management cares how much the tools cost if they make the engineers significantly more productive. The human costs dwarf the tools cost. So the real question is how much more do you get out of a team who is using BK than you would get out of a team who is using CVS or whatever. If the answer isn't at least the cost of BK then BK is obviously the wrong choice. My personal feeling is that the absolute lowest point that would make sense is a 2x difference. The reality is that for a company of any size, it's way bigger than that. If it wasn't, we'd have no customers. Times are tough. People aren't giving us money because they like us, they do it because the tool gives value in excess of the costs. One customer, when asked if we could tell people about their use of BK, refused to let us because they believe that BK was a competitive advantage, it helped them get to market faster than anyone else. Everyone has to decide for themselves what make sense. I tend to agree that paying for BK for a small number of seats doesn't make sense, with a small number of people you can get by easily with CVS or one of the other free tools. Eventually that will cause you problems and once those problems are costing you money, then you may see that spending that money on BK is actually a net reduction of cost. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/