Is Linux really worth USD $10 billion?

Davey Winder
Thursday, 23 October 2008 18:22

Business IT - Open Source

The Fedora 9 distribution contains 204.5 million lines of code in 5547 application packages, and in terms of development the authors estimate would require some 60,000 man years to complete. Using 2008 salary figures, they came up with the USD $10.8 billion number.

The Linux kernel as included in Fedora 9 has 6.8 million lines of code, and would need more than 7500 man years to develop, hence the USD $1.4 billion figure.

But does this really mean the same thing as putting a real world value onto Linux itself? The study makes it very clear as to the enormous economic value that a collaborative development of this nature can attract.

You only have to look at the last couple of years worth of Linux kernel development with some 3200 developers spread across 200 companies making a contribution to get a glimpse of the scale of effort involved.

Oh, and don't forget to then scale it ever upwards when talking about a full Linux distribution.

The conclusions are made all the more relevant after a year in which we have seen Linux increasingly bursting into the public consciousness courtesy of the netbook explosion, for example, which quite simply would not have been thought possible a couple of years back.

These devices, that market success, would not have been possible without Linux and without the collaborative development model behind it.

Report author Amanda McPherson, also a Vice President at the Linux Foundation, says "Monopolistic software companies used to be able to fund heavy R&D budgets, keeping out competition. Given the cost associated with building an OS like Linux, one wonders if proprietary companies will ever go it alone again.”