Marginalia
• Guardedly expressed money is not the most present aspect in the discussion of open source software and free software. But like Richard Stallman and the GNU project have often stated: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer" (comp. The Free Software Definition). Hence cost management can be a subject of Free Software Projects in both senses: At first in the sense, that free software projects reflects and manage their own costs. And secondly that free software projects can develop software to manage costs.
Project Cost Management
As already mentioned the Project Cost Management has to describe and execute all those "[... ] processes involved in planning, estimating, budgeting, and controlling costs so that the project can be completed within the approved budget". And naturally there exists also an intrinsic order following the pattern «plan», «execute», and «control»:
- At first one has to estimate the costs of the project.
- Secondly one has to budget these costs.
- And finally one has to control the costs by comparing the cost baseline and the budget level.
(comp. PMBOK3, page 157)