# How much does it cost to use open source software?

DevFeed: [How much does it cost to use open source software?](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-use-open-source-software-77544.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://opensource.googleblog.com/2026/10/how-much-does-it-cost-to-use-open-source-software.html>)

Author: Google Open Source (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2026-10-08T18:30:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Google Open Source Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/google-open-source-blog.md>)

Topics: [open source maintenance](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source-maintenance.md>), [software composition analysis](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-composition-analysis.md>), [F#](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/fsharp.md>)

Tags: [cost](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cost.md>), [customization](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customization.md>), [developer-tools](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer-tools.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/productivity.md>), [research](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/research.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>)

## AI overview

A Google study measured the engineering effort required to update open source software packages internally. Most updates took four hours or less, while some took days to months. Local patches and customization, dependency counts, and upstream contributor counts were more useful indicators of update complexity than package age or internal usage.

## Source excerpt

by Sophia Vargas, Google Open Source Open source software is used pervasively, with some estimating that over 90% of codebases contain open source software. Many adopt open source software because it's free and thus cheaper than writing a proprietary alternative. But as the community saying goes: "open source is free as in puppies, not free as in beer." Once you or your organization has adopted an open source project, there is still effort (such as engineering time, costs, etc.) associated with ensuring that your version of an open source project is healthy and up to date. While efforts by the research community have investigated the ongoing costs required to maintain open source software, at Google we needed to better understand the resources required to use thousands of open source software packages. To better understand this cost, we designed a study to evaluate the effort (in software engineering hours) associated with maintaining open source software packages within Google. We focused on the following questions: RQ1: How long does it take for an engineer (not a maintainer of the upstream project) to update an open source software package at Google? RQ2: Can complexity metrics predict the relative effort/amount of time to update a package at Google? Customization incurs additional cost The majority of open source package updates (at Google) take four hours or less. However, the long tail could be days to months to fully land a package update. We needed to understand what makes the difference between hours, days, and months. Our results suggested metrics that could be better predictors of update complexity than others. For example, local patches and customization, the number of package dependencies, and the number of upstream contributors, were better indicators of update complexity than the age of the package, or how many teams were using that package internally. Study limitations and future work As this study was completed at Google, we acknowledge there are bi