That's right! $8.8T.
The number is Harvard Business School's. Researchers there priced the world's Open Source software from both ends. Writing it once, the supply side, cost about $4.2 billion. Rebuilding it from scratch, firm by firm, would cost $8.8 trillion. The distance between those two numbers is what sharing code is worth, and it resolves to a single finding for your business: without Open Source, firms would pay 3.5 times more for the software that runs them.1
And $8.8 trillion is the conservative end. The authors excluded operating systems from the study altogether. Linux, the thing most of the world's computing actually stands on, is not in the figure at all.
Consider what that leaves out. More than 60% of customer cores in Azure run Linux, by Microsoft's own count, on Microsoft's own cloud.2 Every one of the 500 fastest computers on earth has run Linux since November 2017, and every list since without exception.3 Android phones, Kindles, Chromebooks, Raspberry Pis and Teslas are Linux. Every major browser renders through an Open Source engine. WordPress alone runs 41.5% of all websites.4 So why are your office PC and mine still running Windows? Old habits die hard.
The habit runs deeper than the desktop, and so does the dependency. Black Duck audited 947 commercial codebases across 17 industries last year and found Open Source in 98% of them.5 Whatever software your firm bought, it is largely Open Source that someone else assembled and someone else must maintain. You never chose whether to run Open Source. You chose only whether anyone is stewarding it.
Stewardship has an owner, and owners change. In 2019, IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, the company that maintains the Linux distribution of the same name, and then the largest software acquisition ever made. Red Hat's customers woke up under an owner they had not chosen, and nothing happened to them. The license could not be withdrawn, the source stayed open, and rebuilt distributions of the same Linux were a migration away.
Then Broadcom paid $61 billion for VMware in 2023 and took that record. This time the customers had nowhere to stand. Broadcom ended perpetual VMware licensing outright: the license bought once and owned forever simply stopped being sold.6 In March 2026, Europe's cloud infrastructure providers told the European Commission that price rises, bundling and minimum commitments based on potential rather than actual usage had "cumulatively increased costs by more than 1,000 percent".7 There was no rebuilt VMware to move to, because the source had never been open.
Red Hat and VMware were both infrastructure that other people's businesses were standing on. Red Hat's customers could walk away. VMware's could not. That is what Open Source buys you: leverage. A license that cannot be revoked cannot be repriced, and software that can be rebuilt cannot be held hostage.
That leverage is the whole of "set and forget". Anything can be set. Only what stays put can be forgotten, and proprietary infrastructure does not stay put: it is set by you, forgotten by you, and repriced by someone else while you are not looking.
This is what we bring: a Guild of senior technologists who build your servers, your cloud, and every layer in between. We steward Microsoft estates, Linux estates, and the mixed ones most firms actually have. Your staff keep the applications they know. Where we build the infrastructure, we choose its foundations by merit rather than habit. Open Source is not free of cost. It is free of the meter, and that is the part that compounds. Harvard's 3.5x is an economy-wide figure rather than a quote for your firm, but set against tech spend that already averages $255,000 a year at 26 to 100 employees, the direction is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance and license costs.*
Concierge CIO Partners is a unified Guild of senior technologists providing dedicated, long-term fiduciary IT leadership to midmarket service firms. It offers a strategic alternative to fragile internal IT silos and to Managed Service Providers who advise you on what to buy and are paid on what you buy. With transparent unit pricing and an automated service catalog, the Guild eliminates administrative bloat and ensures every IT dollar spent and decision made directly drives your financial performance. Whenever possible, the Guild Stewards build on Open Source and open standards, so what they set for your firm cannot be repriced by an owner you never chose.
* This is substantiated here
1 Hoffmann, Nagle & Zhou, Harvard Business School WP 24-038; HBS Working Knowledge, March 2024. 2 Microsoft Azure. 3 TOP500, operating system family statistics. 4 W3Techs, July 2026. 5 Black Duck, 2026 OSSRA report. 6 VMware by Broadcom, January 2024. 7 CISPE competition complaint, 19 March 2026.