I thought this was a very full economic analysis of different approaches to software development. At this point it’s a bit dated so the study should be conducted again, but I think this really contributes to how people should be thinking about total cost of ownership of different kinds of software, as well as the role of standards.
I've wanted to read a good analysis of the affects of open source for years. This was that, and the author made some really interesting discoveries, some that were very surprising. It reads like a research paper though. Expect most of it to be analyzing how he got the data, the statistical methods used, and the graphs, and the raw data summaries. Most of what he concludes is probably common sense for a software developer, but still, it's a worthwhile read if software is your profession.