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

[Hogan, Patrick (ARC-PX)]

You make the service available, simply a single online instance at the server. You then multiply your typical license fee (multiple years?) to the potential customer base (schools and maybe even per child) and [wallah]! Your ‘largess’ is exorbitantly large! Might even be a tax write-off worth even more than the ‘gift.’

From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Vaclav Petras
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2015 6:54 AM
To: Suchith Anand
Cc: discuss at lists.osgeo.org; ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] [OSGeo-Discuss] How to quantify the economic impact of OSGeo software? Your help needed for a research article


On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
For example, reading through http://news.aag.org/2015/05/aag-seeks-proposal-authors-reviewers-for-new-ap-course-in-gist/  i understand that  "In 2014, Esri announced a $1 billion gift of cloud-based ArcGIS Online software to support the Obama Administration’s ConnectEd initiative. This remarkable gift is providing free ArcGIS Online accounts to any public or private school upon request. " I am interested to understand how this $1 billion gift is calculated?  Can anyone knowledgeable on this provide the details of these metrics use for this calculation?

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.

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