this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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To add, let's do some math!
Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.
s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.
We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.
For instance, let's say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He's a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.
If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.
In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.