With all the talk I've heard about how open source lowers costs of development and ownership, I think it's about time for some enterprising software company out there to sink its teeth into a project that might seem way out into the stratosphere: a suite for performing open source TCO calculation, that covers everything from development to deployment to user education. Is this even possible?

"Ambitious" is the word that came to mind -- ambitious to a fault, maybe. But I've become convinced that having a valid sense of how much you're really going to save if you switch to open source (either as a developer or an implementer) requires hard numbers all the way down the line.

On the development side, you'd need something to track the potential cost of using proprietary vs. open source components -- a big brother to the dev tools we have now. A much bigger brother, come to think of it, designed not only to aid programmers but IT people, CIOs, and everyone else along the way.

Most of my ideas in this regard were sparked in a conversation with the folks at Black Duck Software, who're introducing their own software suite to aid the managed re-use of both open source and proprietary software components. What I'm thinking of, though, would incorporate Black Duck's tools as a subset of the whole approach.

Again, is such a thing too over-arching to even be possible? I'd be curious to know.

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