The Linux Foundation puts a value on Linux

[Posted October 22, 2008 by corbet]

The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of a study attempting to estimate the value of a Linux distribution. "Using 2008 salary figures, the tests published in the paper revealed that if developed today, the full set of Fedora 9 distribution packages would cost $10.8 billion. The Fedora 9 distribution contains 204.5 million lines of code in 5547 application packages. The development effort estimate comes close to 60,000 Person-Years."

The Linux Foundation puts a value on Linux

Posted Oct 22, 2008 16:56 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (1 responses)

Very neat! I've posted some comments about the Linux Foundation's 2008 study.

The Linux Foundation puts a value on Linux

Posted Oct 22, 2008 18:18 UTC (Wed) by tjasper (subscriber, #4310) [Link]

David,

In your post, you note that deleted lines are not counted in the SLOC costing estimates. I wonder, that if in a way, they are. The costings, I believe, are based on what a developer might produce and be paid for. I don't believe that developers produce perfect results first time, so there is undoubtably some wasted code. Similarly, they might develop chunks of code which are never used, paid for, or completely re-written - or the customer changes their mind (apparently can happen!!!!) and code is redundant. Therefore, it is a reasonable approximation to say that code deletions are somewhat covered by the costing rationale i.e. even paid developers don't get paid exactly for every SLOC they write.

Just my $0.02

YellowShed

The Linux Foundation puts a value on Linux

Posted Oct 23, 2008 6:31 UTC (Thu) by jasonjgw (subscriber, #52080) [Link]

As I remember, the results of running sloccount over one of the Debian
releases were published several years ago. Perhaps the immanent release of
Lenny would be a good opportunity to repeat the process, if anyone has the
resources and inclination to do so.

Since Debian contains one of the largest collections of foss, if not the
largest, the total sloc would give an approximation of the monetary value of
what the free/open-source software community has created and continues to
maintain and improve. This is not to suggest that undue importance should be
placed on the monetary value (effectively, the replacement cost), since there
are many other respects in which the software is valuable to people. However,
this particular measure is at least readily quantifiable.

duplicated work

Posted Oct 24, 2008 7:48 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (guest, #24141) [Link]

While these numbers are informative, they are not really suitable for comparison. A Linux distribution contains any number of IRC clients, editors, window managers, desktops and many other programs that perform the same function or a very similar function. It would be interesting to know the value of a complete software stack without duplication as well.