Normative reference for 350+ MLOCS? [LWN.net]

Normative reference for 350+ MLOCS?

Posted Oct 2, 2006 19:41 UTC (Mon) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: Normative reference for 350+ MLOCS? by piggy
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

Does anyone have a normative reference for this 350+ million LOC available under the GPL? Translating that to total developers over 15 years gives me something between 2000 and 10,000 developers working on GPL'd code. That is about the range I estimate for developers CURRENTLY working on the Linux kernel alone.

I did some pretty precise measurements ~2 years ago on the total sourcecode of FC3, and i extrapolated from that to FC6 and got 370 million lines of code. (and that takes code duplication into account already)

Note that FC6 has ~2200 packages right now, while Debian has well over 15000. The gzip compressed source code size of FC6 is 2.6 GB, the compressed source code size of Debian is 8.8 GB. So Debian's size is somewhere around 1.2 billion lines of free code.

So i think it's probably fair to say that free software has recently hit (or will soon hit) the 1 billion lines of code landmark. I said the 350+ mloc metric in the discussion because i'm reasonably certain about that metric. (i did it myself)

The kernel, when it was 4.2 million lines of code, was estimated to be equivalent to the value of commercial code developed from scratch for 175 million US dollars, under a hand-tuned COCOMO model with a multiplicator of 2.40.

370 million lines of code, even assuming a default 1.0 COCOMO complexity multiplicator and developed from scratch, is worth 6.2 billion US dollars. Under the same metric, Debian's 1.2 billion lines of code is worth 21.2 billion US dollars.

Of course the freedom offered by free software cannot be measured in US dollars, but still it's good to know the rough value of the economic foundation this community has built for itself.

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Normative reference for 350+ MLOCS?

Posted Oct 2, 2006 22:15 UTC (Mon) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

> Of course the freedom offered by free software cannot be measured in US
> dollars, but still it's good to know the rough value of the economic
> foundation this community has built for itself.

This is why I think it is very important that the FSF has been doing the
GPLv3 drafting as they have, by involving people from around the world in
the review and commentary over 3 discussion drafts over a one year
period. They know that they are doing important work on everyone's
behalf, and not everyone wants the same thing out of this work, so
they've been trying to bring people together.

I don't think Linus's implication that the FSF didn't care what he
thought is fair. Thats why I attempt to remind of the difference between
listening to someone and unilaterally doing what they say. But the
feedback of Linus, you, and the other developers is still important. If
you are at all concerned about the license, please don't sit out from the
discussion. You don't have to answer to anybody - you can walk right into
the discussion process as Ingo Molnar with whatever opinions and concerns
you have. You might not alter the course of the license, but is it more
important for LWN readers to hear you, or the people doing that which
concerns you?

Normative reference for 350+ MLOCS?

Posted Oct 3, 2006 0:06 UTC (Tue) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

You don't have to answer to anybody - you can walk right into the discussion process as Ingo Molnar with whatever opinions and concerns you have.

What makes you assume that i have not done so already?

Normative reference for 350+ MLOCS?

Posted Oct 3, 2006 2:27 UTC (Tue) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

Well, when I refer to the discussion process in this way, I'm refering to
formal participation. And laf0rge posted elsewhere in this commentary on
LWN that he was the only kernel developer he saw at 3 conferences. And it
seems like from some of the statements of the other developers that no one
really got directly involved for various reasons.

But you are right. I made an assumption, and for that I must apologize.