Linux Foundation Reverse Engineers the Cost of a Linux Distro
by Sam Dean - Oct. 22, 2008Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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Buzz is going around about a new report from the Linux Foundation, which finds that "it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs." You can get the complete findings here. Here are some of the highlights from the report, and what's missing.
The Linux Foundation's report is an update of a study done in 2002, which found that it would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone. (Many commercial companies, including IBM and Oracle, contribute people and dollars to work on the kernel, as we covered here.)
The Linux Foundation's summary says this: "This study reveals that collaborative development creates enormous economic value. In the past two years alone, over 3,200 developers from 200 companies have contributed to the kernel. An even larger number has contributed to full Linux distributions."
There were several approaches that the Linux Foundation employed to reach the $10.8 billion dollar figure, including calculating the number of lines of code in Fedora 9 (204,500,946), and using an average programmer's salary of $75,662.08--as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor--to measure development costs.
I'm in agreement with this point from Internet News, though:Â "In addition to the actual lines of code in Linux, there is also another potentially valuable asset that Linux has: its brand." This gets into the always murky area of accounting for the goodwill a particular brand has, and Linux has plenty.
On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset. On its 2007 balance sheet, Coke listed over $4.25 billion dollars for goodwill as an asset it owned. Just as the hypothetical development costs that the Linux Foundation is measuring will rise over time, so will the amount of goodwill that Linux, and individual distros like Fedora, have. Goodwill counts for a lot.
