What's The Linux Kernel Worth?

schneelocke writes "What's the value of the Linux kernel? After an offer by one Jeff V. Merkey to pay 50K USD for a BSD-licensed copy of Linux, David Wheeler does some calculations and comes up with an estimate of 612M USD." Wheeler has come up with a number of interesting software-worth estimates and other quantified facts about Free software; since some aspects involve ineffables and hypotheticals, the details can be argued, but he provides a good framework with SLOCCount.

Comments

Re:Nothing

[Hatta]

The discussion based on the offer is what would it be worth in a binary-only form under a BSD-style license. The developers are willing to accept a price of $0 for the code under a GPL license, but are not willing to sell at any price under a less restrictive license.

As an end user, with a GPL Linux I can have the source code, and thus the freedom to do what I want with it. With a BSD binary linux, if I want to change it, I'm screwed. Therefore, the BSD license is more restrictive.