Subject: Valuing IETF efforts in Submissions and NoteWell work.

From: "TS Glassey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:11:52 -0800

Its time to formally attach  a value (in US Dollars) to the work the IETF 
and American Companies are doing in building the Internet Protocols their 
products and services are based on.

I once proposed a flat model based on  the number of hours into any 
Document, multiplied by the hourly wage. Its a simple cost-to-replace 
calculation and omits any support. per diem or travel costs. It also 
neglects to factor in the costs of maintaining the physical infrastructure 
that allows the distributed-collaboration which is the basis of the IETF's 
interchange processes.

With that said... you do the math - for each RFC there is probably upwards 
of 1000 man hours of work into them. Many of them which are parts of 
formally supported initiatives have many times that involved and many others 
have been revved so many times this also has to be factored into the 
calculation for each document.

Then we get to the Internet Drafts and their overhead. Figure 100 to 300 
hours each as a reasonable number I would figure.

Finally we get to the averaged cost to employ - Lets take a stab at a 
reasonable number of $120/Hr (includes costs of both employees and 
contractor/consultants). We have seen how many I-D's to date?... If its 
10,000 then at the low end the I-D's IP Value is 10000 x 100 x 120  is 
somewhere around 120M USD.

Likewise the IP underneath the 5300 RFC's published to date there likely is 
5300 x 1000 x 120 is somewhere like 636M USD. Now factor in all the Employee 
Development Costs and the Travel Expense and other Enablement Costs and the 
IETF's Intellectual Property Library is worth in excess of $1B and I am 
betting its closer to $2B.

---
Personal Disclaimers Apply

TS Glassey 

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