Is Linux really worth USD $10 billion?

Davey Winder
Thursday, 23 October 2008 18:22

Business IT - Open Source

Just how do you put a value on an open source, free for all, piece of code such as Linux? The Linux Foundation has attempted to do just that, and valued just one single distro at more than USD $10 billion.

The nonprofit consortium charged with fostering Linux growth, the Linux Foundation , was only founded last year. It sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and has support from Linux and open source companies around the world.

The Linux Foundation dedicates itself to 'accelerating the growth of Linux' but what if you wanted to build a Linux distribution yourself, right now? Something like Fedora 9, for example. How much money would that need given software development costs today?

Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt and Ron Hale-Evans put their collective heads together and did the math in a newly published paper title "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution."

So, did the intrepid trio really discover that the true value of Linux code is USD $10 billion? No, of course not. They discovered that it was USD $10.8 billion!

What's more, they say, it would take USD $1.4 billion just to develop the Linux kernel on its own. Which is more than the USD $1.2 billion David A. Wheeler reckoned it would take for a fully blown Linux distro (Red Hat Linux 7.1) when he did a similar study back in 2002.

How did the authors come up with those figures? Well they examined the Fedora 9 distribution using the same tools and methods as Wheeler before them, specifically the SLOCCount tool that estimates value and effort of software development based on the COnstructive COst MOdel (COCOMO).

What about the Fedora code and the Linux kernel itself, and what conclusions can we draw from the figures when it comes to monopolistic software companies and the development of proprietary code? More on page 2...

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