[OSGeo-Discuss] How to quantify the economic impact of OSGeo software? Your help needed for a research article

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Newcomb, Doug <doug_newcomb at fws.gov> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Suchith Anand
>> <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:
>> I don't know about their calculation but here is mine:
>>
>> If I provide service for $100 per customer and I give the same service to
>> 10 customers for free, I could claim that I donated $1000. But this would be
>> wrong. I need some money to run the service for the non-paying customers and
>> I need to get this money from the paying customers. Thus, the price $100
>> already contains money to run the service for non-paying customers and the
>> gift $1000 is therefore overestimated.
>>
>> Well, these are my two cents. Correct if I'm wrong.

You should see value and price disconnected. Probably your customers
will gain more value than $100 when purchasing your product (or when
obtaining it for free). In economic terms, you should not only count
the producer surplus, but also the consumer surplus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus