Fedora 9 Would Cost $10.8B To Build From Scratch

ruphus13 writes "The Linux Foundation's recently released report claims, '... 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.' The article states why this might actually understate the value of the distros, though, since it doesn't include the power of the brand and the goodwill value. '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 US Department of Labor — to measure development costs ... On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset.'"

Comments

Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

average programmer's salary of $75,662.08--as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor

Holy hell, that's probably more than I make in 10 years.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's time for a new career.

Re:Average salary?

[jagilbertvt]

Perhaps you should consider working on something other than an open source project :)

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

You make $3.78/hr ?

Where I live people who make $75k have to live in an apartment, and it is unlikely they will be approved for a home loan without at least 30% down (around $150k). If you save aggressively on that sort of salary it should only take about 5-7 years to scrap together enough money for your down payment. Once you have the house, I'm not sure how you pay the mortgage (roughly $3k/month).

For you it will take closer to 70 years.

Re:Average salary?

[the_humeister]

Or you move to somewhere where you can afford to buy a house (if you really do want a house). This whole economic crisis of ours is/was exacerbated by people Keeping Up With The Joneses (tm) and being way over their heads debt to pay for it all.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmmm - You live in the Bay Area or something, don't you?

Re:Average salary?

[plague3106]

Sounds like where you live, housing is way over valued and needs to fall even further to be realistic.

Re:Average salary?

[gad_zuki!]

Buy a smaller house or condo. 30% down? Usually its 20%. The housing in your area sounds a tad overpriced to me or your example is just another case of living beyond one's means.

Lastly, home purchasing in the US is priced for couples, not individuals.

Re:Average salary?

[WhiteWolf666]

No necessarily to the parent, but the GP, there are places in the US where you can live very comfortable on $50-$75k per year. Mostly smaller towns 100-150 miles from major metropolitan areas. I'm thinking Chicago's Rockford, or Elgin. Or any of the various industrialized suburbs of Milwaukee, or Brookfield, WI, or similar towns.

Take out an FHA loan on a cheap property, something that needs a lot of love, and put in the work yourself (that way you *know* the value will go up; it's not appreciating, its sweat equity!).

$50-75k is a very good salary in some areas, particularly if you aren't keeping up the Jones, and don't mind doing work around the house (probably a lot).

Re:Average salary?

[tepples]

there are places in the US where you can live very comfortable on $50-$75k per year. Mostly smaller towns 100-150 miles from major metropolitan areas.

And then the salary would be even smaller than $50-$75k. I'm an employee of a small online toy and hobby retailer in northeast Indiana, and my boss and I are having trouble finding enough work to take me from part-time to full-time.

Re:Average salary?

[Grimbleton]

Yeah, but Aldis only hires women and homosexual males.

This, from a homosexual male at Aldis when I tried to get an application.

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

Got it in 1.

I live here because I can find lots of work. I just don't plan on buying a home here while rent is relatively cheap compared to a mortgage. I can invest the difference in money somewhere else while the housing bubble deflates a bit.

Re:Average salary?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

There was that study a couple of years ago that showed that top programmers are 4x as productive as the average ones.

So hire a bunch of top programmers and pay 'em twice that rate, and you'll still halve development costs.

Of course, if the guys in charge of The Linux Foundation's estimation were actually top programmers, they'd have relized this. But noooooooo, they're trying to rhetorically prove a point.

I suppose if you hired 4x as many crappy programmers for half that rate, you can pay $20 billion to develop Fedora 9.

Re:Average salary?

[Sockatume]

I assume it was the mean, and not the far more representitive median. People forget that quoting the "average" of something is like quoting the "quickness" of a car. It's a meaningless term if it's unqualified.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you still live there? You do realize that there are much more affordable areas to live in the country?

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

Median home price hit 625k here. A bad place in the bay is about 425k, condos *start* at 450k and quickly move to 550k.

In the Bay Area, buying a house (or condo) with a single $75k/yr income is a "case of living beyond one's means."

What do you mean by "overpriced"? The term has no real meaning if you consider supply and demand. What is the worth of a house? Wouldn't it be what people are willing to pay? How you can "overprice" something, but still manage to sell it? You may feel that the price is excessively high, but people like you (and me) don't determine the market. I don't like that something's value is what it is because everyone else is paying that much. but that is the way the system works, if I don't like it then I don't have to buy.

In the US it is common for only one person in a family to work. Two incomes are for people without children, and for times when the economy is good and unemployment is low. I do agree that, at least in the more urban areas of the US, homes are priced for working couples. I just don't agree that it makes sense.

Re:Average salary?

[Critical Facilities]

Median home price hit 625k here. A bad place in the bay is about 425k, condos *start* at 450k and quickly move to 550k.

I'm gonna have to call "shenanigans" on your $$ figures there. According to this it would appear there are plenty of homes one could buy that are FAR less than your supposed $625K "median" price.

While we're on it, according to this:

A total of 7,271 new and resale houses and condominiums sold last month in the nine-county region, marking a 0.5 percent uptick from August. The median sales price fell 36 percent from a year earlier to a five-year low of $400,000, MDA DataQuick said.

Re:Average salary?

[caluml]

I want a 1 bathroom, no bedroom house too!

Re:Average salary?

[fishbowl]

As I wander around San Francisco, I see people living in some pretty squalid housing. I think to myself, "that's a 2 million dollar property? How? And how does that guy manage it?"

I get the impression that there might be affordable housing in San Francisco, though not the really desirable kind of housing that goes for $1000 per square foot.

I could be wrong, but then, the market still bears ridiculous pricing. It means you either need equity in the market, or it means that enough people have enough income to saturate the housing market.

I love the Bay Area, but there are only a few parts that I think I want to live in. I'm amused by the real estate in San Fran because I know of a time when some of the 10 million dollar victorians were considered "ghetto" and were difficult to sell at any price.

There are people who move to the Bay Area as an end in itself. I would move there if I could consider it a benefit of having a job or a business that earned enough that the expense of living there was not my most significant concern. On the other hand, I think my resumé allows me to say things like that to recruiters :-)

Meanwhile, I'll settle for an Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista and a Tikka Masala at India Curry House, and then leave the City for my relatively low cost of living home. The Bay Area doesn't want me so badly that it's willing to make it look cheap, so why in the hell would I move there? If the best I could do was $75K, I'm pretty sure I'd make a priority of getting out of there.

Re:Average salary?

[mrdoogee]

Good Lord! I live in SoCal and it isn't that bad here.(At least not since the Mortgage bubble exploded.) Where exactly do you live?

Re:Average salary?

[Pantero Blanco]

I'm gonna have to call "shenanigans" on your $$ figures there. According to this it would appear there are plenty of homes one could buy that are FAR less than your supposed $625K "median" price.

That's the wrong point to make. Half of the homes (give or take half of a house) would be under the "median price", in either case. Unlike the mean, how far some go above or below it doesn't affect it. If the prices were $5, $5, $5, $60000, $80000, $80000, and $85000, $60000 would be the median.

You do appear to be correct about his first figure (the "bad place in the Bay" being wrong, though.

A total of 7,271 new and resale houses and condominiums sold last month in the nine-county region, marking a 0.5 percent uptick from August. The median sales price fell 36 percent from a year earlier to a five-year low of $400,000, MDA DataQuick said.

$400,000 / .64 = 625,000. It did "hit" 625K, evidently, but certainly isn't there any more.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaliphonia is about to see a MAJOR house correction over the next decade...

vc: epidemic

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it's time to quit McDonalds and get a real job.

Re:Average salary?

[Risen888]

In America, homeownership, like college, is a capitalist trap designed to force you into lifelong slavery. Fuck the house, own your life.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if people who make $75k per year have to live in an apartment, where do the people who make less than $20k per year (low wage workers) live? In a cardboard box?

It seems kinda stupid to be living where you are living unless you are making well over six figures. I can't imagine what your income taxes must be on a salary like that.

Re:Average salary?

[drerwk]

One of the listings:
This 0 square foot property has 0 bedroom(s) and 0 bath(s).
The estimated sale price is $49900.

I knew Pacific Height was expensive, but this seems to be greater than infinite$$$/sq ft.

Re:Average salary?

[nick.ian.k]

No necessarily to the parent, but the GP, there are places in the US where you can live very comfortable on $50-$75k per year. Mostly smaller towns 100-150 miles from major metropolitan areas. I'm thinking Chicago's Rockford, or Elgin. Or any of the various industrialized suburbs of Milwaukee, or Brookfield, WI, or similar towns.

But that's assuming you can live in such a place and still make $50k-75k a year. Rockford, for example, is one economically depressed town and the decent jobs are scarce in the extreme. To make it "comfortably" there, you'd have to get a job in Chicago or one of the more prosperous close-in suburbs and commute 70-100 miles a day each way. Now, maybe you're accustomed to that idea and see that as just how it is, but to me, that's a pretty ludicrous sacrifice to live in a hole but have a bit of money.

Re:Average salary?

[geekboy642]

It's quite easy to say, "just hire the good programmers". But it's frighteningly hard to select just "good" programmers from a pool of applicants. You can offer tests...but most tests merely discover knowledge of trivia, or an ability to look into the tester's mindset. After all this, once you've found your elite group of star programmers, you'd discover you had to pay them a huge wage to keep them on: twice the average might be much less than a start-up aping Google would pay.

There is a place for junior programmers, though...doing the grunt code. Any significant project will have grunt code that merely has to be written. It doesn't have to be super elegant, it just has to do its job. Paying a star programmer to write getters and setters all day is surely a huge waste of his abilities.

Re:Average salary?

[clem]

But then who's going to refill my coffee?

Re:Average salary?

[Windows_NT]

Thank god for the woods!
Im a programmer, and live in Northern MN, and i know i dont get paid alot (30K/year?) But living up here is nice because it was enough for the banking officer to give me 165k for my new 4 bedroom house :) (and 10 acres and a garage i can fit my huse in). Oh yea, and all the deer i can shoot from my door step :)
The bottom line is that it might not be worth going to a big city to get that big job, because everything costs so damn much.!

Re:Average salary?

[Ihmhi]

It's also quite easy to do a 90 day trial for a job to evaluate performance. Many places do this and something similar. An acquaintance of mine started out working at Google as a contract worker - he works for the company for a limited amount of time (a year, I believe), and then they evaluate him at the conclusion of that time period and see if they want to bring him on board.

He now proudly sports his @google.com e-mail as he's a full-time employee. He's working for a good company and Google knows they have a good worker.

Back in my father's day, you'd walk into a store and a manager might try you out for a few weeks and see how you do. If he liked you, he'd keep you on as a full-time employee. If not, he'd have the courtesy to offer you to quit instead of firing you. It's more expensive than just looking at applications and taking a guess, but this is how some of the best businesses get a high percentage of high quality employees.

Nowadays it's an all-or-nothing prospect - usually start someone full time and at their full wage (or not) based on their application and interview alone. I think that's pretty bass ackwards.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

So come on; hit me before I lose my nerve.

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

Date Inventory(SFH + Condo) 25th Percentile 50th Percentil(Median) 75th Percentile

10/2007 7,632 $534,199 $649,517 $823,790
10/2008 9,357 $362,966 $526,266 $791,666

Obviously my data is old. It's 525k in my area now.

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

"I get the impression that there might be affordable housing in San Francisco, though not the really desirable kind of housing that goes for $1000 per square foot."

You are right and wrong. There is affordable housing in San Francisco, it's called an apartment.

Treasure Island, while not really "in" SF is affordable. But you can't *buy*, only lease.

SF is not even the most expensive. Los Altos, Cupertino, and Palo Alto all seem to have astronomical home prices. San Jose, Sunnyvale and to a lesser extent Santa Clara seem to be better. But like I said in another post, median home price in Santa Clara County is 525K as of this month. That's better, but not better enough if you ask me.

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

I've been saying this for 5+ years to my friends, and they just roll their eyes. But I see all these houses just sitting on the market, currently people can't afford to lower the price because they acquired so much debt just to buy the house. But if you sit on a house long enough it starts to become a liability and people will have little choice but to discount it. Especially to compete with all the foreclosures in the market.

Re:Average salary?

[Critical Facilities]

Half of the homes (give or take half of a house) would be under the "median price", in either case. Unlike the mean, how far some go above or below it doesn't affect it. If the prices were $5, $5, $5, $60000, $80000, $80000, and $85000, $60000 would be the median.

Well, that example would be true, and I realize that half of the homes would be below the median price and half would be above. My point essentially was that I thought (and was correct) that the median price he was quoting sounded a little on the high side.

I know we're off on a tangent from the main story's topic, but I just took issue with the idea that someone making $75,000 a year can't own a home. Consider that if you calculate his monthly, bring-home pay, he's looking at between $3900 and $4000 (depending on 401k, benefits, other deductions). Consider also that even if he gets a home for $325K, if you calculate his monthly mortgage payment at current iterest rates, he's looking at a payment of around $1900/month which should be quite do-able.

I agree that the guy's not going to have money coming out his ears, I just disagree with the idea that trying to own a home at that salary, even in that town, doesn't necessarily have to be "living beyond your means". All it really ends up being about is, how much are you willing to work/sacrifice to make it happen.

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

The problem is that people are locked into selling their homes for at least enough to break even. You can't sell it for less without first declaring bankruptcy. And they won't let you declare bankruptcy just because you can't sell your house. It's a Catch-22 for some people out there where they owe more than the place is worth.

Re:Average salary?

[WebmasterNeal]

"Where I live people who make $75k have to live in an apartment, and it is unlikely they will be approved for a home loan without at least 30% down (around $150k)"

Gez, you'd be living pretty decent in the midwest where our average income is $35,000 a year in a $175,000 house.

Re:Average salary?

[Christophotron]

"There are places"!!! LOL! You must not get out much. Ever heard of Houston, TX? Fourth largest city in the USA? You can live like a king on $50-75k. I have a friend who recently got a job as a web dev for a company in Houston, with no college education I might add, and he makes about that much. Bought a 2000+ sq. ft. suburban home in a nice, older neighborhood for around 150k. Could have had an even bigger BRAND NEW home in a new neighborhood, if he wanted. I guess he wanted to live around older folks.

I can't hardly comprehend someone thinking 75k is a "low" salary where you could only live in an apartment and not have extra spending money. And 75k is the starting salary there just like it is here? That would suck. I sure wouldn't want to live in a place like that... I guess it's just me, though.. I grew up here, where the real estate is cheap and plentiful.

Re:Average salary?

[Christophotron]

So if people who make $75k per year have to live in an apartment, where do the people who make less than $20k per year (low wage workers) live? In a cardboard box?

Exactly what I was thinking (I've never been there). Where do all the wage slaves live in an area like that? Like the ones who make your lattés every morning, for example. I don't really see them driving very far to work with gas prices as they are. Are they all rich high school kids who don't really have to work? That might explain it..

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you move to somewhere where you can afford to buy a house (if you really do want a house).

Except then you are no where near your work, causing you to commute hours each way, contributing to our dependence on oil and driving up your own cost of living and carbon footprint.... or you can give up the $75k job and try to find work near this place of cheaper houses. Chances being the decrease in housing cost correlates to a much lower pay scale of the local jobs. Theres a reason some areas (SF Bay) cost MUCH more than others. If there were an area of unlimited cheap housing and unlimited high paying jobs, dont you think most of the population would be there already?

Re:Average salary?

[nick.ian.k]

I can't hardly comprehend someone thinking 75k is a "low" salary where you could only live in an apartment and not have extra spending money.

I think you're forgetting that there are people who insist on living in downtown luxury apartments that go for $3000+ a month and the like because they're accustomed to a "certain standard of living" (by which they mean "flauntable status symbols").

Re:Average salary?

[mweather]

Maybe you should try a full-time job.

Re:Average salary?

[jbengt]

What do you mean by "overpriced"? The term has no real meaning if you consider supply and demand.

I don't know what the OP meant, but if the price is greatly higher than the cost to build, then I consider it overpriced.
Also, if the demand for those high prices is created by questionable approvals of loans with artificially low ARM introductory rates which depend on unwavering rising prices in order to be safe, then supply and demand isn't working.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Arlington Virginia, they just live further away from the metro. Bus anyone?

Re:Average salary?

[kklein]

Preach it! I'm a college teacher, but I'm totally against college loans. They just turn you into a slave when you graduate. My friends who DIDN'T go to college have more discretionary income and cushier jobs than the ones who did. They don't make as much, yes, but they also don't have anywhere near the same expenses.

My wife and I live in an apartment and paid cash for our car. The only monthly bills we have are for utilities (including internet and cellphones--but just the cheapest, cheapest plan).

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I live in an apartment and paid cash for our car. The only monthly bills we have are for utilities

You live in your apartment rent free? How'd you manage that?

Re:Average salary?

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

Or you could just look at their code... Executable size... MFLOPS... Instead of doing some gay interview like google does "What's the most efficient way to sort a million 32 bit integers?"

Re:Average salary?

[plague3106]

Well, my response to that is: Oh well, tough shit.

Stupid people were willing to pay anything for a house and got themselves into crappy mortgages. Sure, banks are scum, which is why I only use credit unions... but so are the people that got themselves into this mess. They were greedy and stupid. I don't feel sorry for homeowners that are now in serious trouble because they can't afford the new interest rate on their house.

Re:Average salary?

[__aawbkb6799]

"What's the most efficient way to sort a million 32 bit integers?"

quicksort.

Re:Average salary?

[OrangeTide]

I certainly agree with you. You sign the papers for a loan, it's entirely your decision and your responsibility. I think anyone who thought home markets can only increase was believe lies that could not pass some basic common sense. Buying something on future prospects is the definition of speculation and risk.

Re:Average salary?

[Anonymous Coward]

People get fabulously wealthy from exploiting the bad decisions of these middle class people who just want a home for their family. It is "tough shit", but do you want to side with the rich?

Re:Average salary?

[shnull]

aye, by the time you're sixteen you're so afraid to lose what little you have that you automatically turn into a law-abiding citizen ... it's a great plan, best thing they could do really since the darks ages : give the little people a little, make them think that it's a lot, and they will be happy to do your slave labour for you so they don't lose their brick wall cave ... aye ... yarr ...

Oh yeah? Guess what Microsoft can do!

[jollyreaper]

They can spend twice that much money and only deliver a tenth of the functionality! That's a win! I think.

Uh, Goofy Accounting

[smack.addict]

Goodwill only shows up on the balance sheet when an acquisition or some similar event occurs which creates a discrepancy between the purchase amount and the balance sheet of the acquisition.

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Ngarrang]

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Goodwill doesn't mean you have a 'good public image' or something like that. It means you paid more during an acquisition of another firm than the net worth of their assets.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Colin Smith]

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

But you just said that you do!

 

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[FireStormZ]

True it should not be used on an accounting sheet but Goodwill is defiantly something to be considered when setting the buying or selling price of a company. Why do you think it was Lenovo wanted so badly to keep the thinkpad brand name when the took it over from IBM?

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[besalope]

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.

Economics does not use Balance Sheets, that would be your Accounting course. Perhaps that is why you failed?

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Kohath]

Subtracting the balance sheet value from the purchase price is not "making up". Subtraction is not magic to many people.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[tehcyder]

Goodwill only shows up on the balance sheet when an acquisition or some similar event occurs which creates a discrepancy between the purchase amount and the balance sheet of the acquisition.

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

Lots of companies do exactly that, but they call it "brand valuation" or something similar.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Ngarrang]

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.

Economics does not use Balance Sheets, that would be your Accounting course. Perhaps that is why you failed?

No, I seem to remember having to do something that looked like a balance sheet in my micro-economics class. I remember in accounting doing a different type of balancing. Those numbers always came out correct, though.

'Misc' is your friend!

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[saider]

Goodwill is used to put a value on abstract things like brand loyalty and public perception, which can have an effect on future revenues. It is not tied to anything of real value, but is used to acknowledge how likely a company is to get business based on these concepts.

For example, Apple likely has a significant goodwill listed on their balance sheet to account for the "fanboy effect". Apple pulls exploits this better than Packard Bell, so I would expect Apple's goodwill value to be higher.

*Note: I have not checked their balance sheets.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

LMFAO. Haha. Better make it 20 billino. Good luck finding anyone who can write code and is willing to work for 75k a year.

Get real. Where does the department of labor get these stats?

Starting salaries for Java developers is 75k with absolutely no experience in the midwest.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[WhiteWolf666]

Why shouldn't it be used on an accounting sheet?

Are the trademark's IBM, or Pledge, or Clorox worthless?

The defining ability to sell products in those categories might actually be the name you sell them under! It could potentially be the *most* important factor, above and beyond support, product quality, even price!

This is *very* *real*.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[FireStormZ]

Because there is no proper way to value it, show me the formula for figuring out the value of a name brand..

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if its made up.
I want my Salary to increase. Bring on these ridiculous numbers.

One thing I don't understand about you free-software guys, sure Linux is great, but a lot of Microsoft's tactics are why your salary is above other fields (and why some of it went overseas sure), but if everything is free why would anyone pay you a dime?

Being a Sys-Admin is a shit-job. I would much rather get paid to do creative development instead of Constantly NMapping my network for security holes or changing friggen Passwords. ugh. I read as many Tech documents as a Doctor reads medical brochures but get paid a 1/4th as much. My job is harder than any of the bozos I went to college with who had 'Business' degrees, and a lot of them are on par with my salary.

I didnt do computer work simply for the pay, but now that I've been out of college a while, it certainly irritates the hell out of me that pay-grades are actually coming Down in my field. Microsoft for life. Free software can eat my ass.
(and don't say because the software is free there is more money to spend on the Staff, because that has never been true in any office I have ever worked in, I think All our software costs for an entire year are less than 50 grand, and at a large corp, it will be more, but you have a much larger staff)

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[dontmakemethink]

You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.

And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.

Economics does not use Balance Sheets, that would be your Accounting course. Perhaps that is why you failed?

His teacher failed him because his improper application of the wrong tools in the wrong field could lead him to politics.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[mcvos]

LMFAO. Haha. Better make it 20 billino. Good luck finding anyone who can write code and is willing to work for 75k a year.

Get real. Where does the department of labor get these stats?

Starting salaries for Java developers is 75k with absolutely no experience in the midwest.

Then programmers are really underpaid in Netherland. I definitely do have experience, I live in the biggest and one of the most expensive cities in the country (more jobs than houses) but I still make less than $75k (and this new rise of the dollar isn't helping).

Ofcourse I could be making more money if I didn't constantly choose to work for open source companies, but even my best job offer so far would have been less than $75k.

The only place where I've seen that kind of salaries for my qualifications is in the financial sector (and I kinda suspect they won't be offering quite that much anymore either).

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Afraid not, saider. Accounting goodwill relates only to the difference between what an acquiring company pays for assets (or an entire company) and what those assets were valued on the other company's balance sheet. It's just an accounting thing -- it has nothing to do with the value of a brand.

Best example: check out Coca-Cola (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=KO). They have a goodwill item on there of about $4 billion. If you can buy the Coke brand name for $4 billion, let me know... it's worth a fair bit more. The value of all of Coke's assets on its balance sheet are (only) $47 billion, but the stock market values KO at about $97 billion... basically because of the value of that brand name, which isn't anywhere on the balance sheet.

You won't catch me disagreeing that brands are valuable, but they're not valuable to accountants.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if an acquisition had been made and goodwill appeared on the balance sheet, you still wouldn't calculate it into the cost to build a company from scratch.

The market value of a company does not equal the costs to create it.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[thorayi]

"You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet." Now that's denial. I thought Enron, Worldcomm, AIG, Freddie and Fannie, Lehman, Merryl, Wachovia, and all those companies did that. Moreover every company which restated their earnings did it as well - that's all most all of the listed companies out there. So it's a rule, not an exception to make up numbers. The only point of contention is how to makeup the number.

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[bagsc]

"Goodwill" merely means that the value of control of the organization (shareholder's equity), when last sold, was worth more than the total value of all it's paid-in-capital, retained earnings, and par value of the stock. As "Fedora 9" is a piece of intellectual property, and isn't a corporation itself, it can never have goodwill.

Sure, the brand has valuable copyrights and trademarks. All the non-released source code would technically be a "trade secret," which can also be valued as intellectual property. If they're talking about an operating unit that solely creates and refines Fedora 9, then that unit could have goodwill if it were first valued, then sold for more than its value.

The concept of "goodwill" arises because a lot of the value of an organization is in the way it is organized. If a company doesn't want to be bought, you can imagine the value of the company would go down (imagine how your productivity would change if your company was bought out by Microsoft...). Hence, you typically have to pay more - enough to keep people happy enough - hence you're buying "goodwill." Mind you, usually the people the acquirer is trying to keep happy are the upper management and board, not the employees...

Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting

[SL Baur]

One thing I don't understand about you free-software guys, sure Linux is great, but a lot of Microsoft's tactics are why your salary is above other fields (and why some of it went overseas sure), but if everything is free why would anyone pay you a dime?

Real programmers, who truly understand software and systems need never worry about their next paycheck even if all the system software is OSS. There will always be plenty of specialized software floating around that will never be open sourced and will need human support.

If my company were all Linux, I'd be more efficient because of a decent mail system and they could afford to pay me more. As it is, I support internal software on Linux and that works.

Paying programmers by lines of code...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is like paying airplane manufacturers by weight.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[OshEcho]

Mod parent up :)

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[jellomizer]

True. But estimating the costs it is a better mechanism. A heavier airplane is normally more expensive to build. So it probably trends that an estimate cost is proportional by the weight of the airplane.

The same thing with coding. Saying programmer A is more valuable then programmer B because programmer A wrote more lines, is of course stupid. As they are doing different things, or approaching the solution differently. However using lines of code when you don't have other variables (eg. man hours, skill sets etc...) is better then nothing as there is normally a statical trend of more code is more expensive. We are comparing valuing based on trends. Where a lot of details get whitewashed threw the averages. The guy who writes 1 liners is averaged with Mr. Verbose. creating a middle of the ground which is probably close to the average cost.
Analysis of the Micro vs the Macro is often quite different.

It is like the difference of saying. Democrats want to raise your taxes, is in the Macro true. However saying Oboma, a democrat, wants to raise your taxes isn't necessarily true.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[Arceliar]

...is like paying airplane manufacturers by weight.

I got the impression that they didn't calculate their pay by lines of code directly. They calculated it by the estimated number of man-hours required to write and debug said code, divided it up into a number of full-time man-years, and multiplied by the average salary. It's only like paying plane manufacturers by weight if you consider that more planes means more weight.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[wideBlueSkies]

There might be something to this though.

1 year I wrote about 750,000 lines of code to kick off a new system. (15% comments).

The guy sitting 1 cube over was on a production support project... bug fixes, small enhancements.

We were both making about $80,000 at the time.

A clear difference in productivity. I've been promoted since then & have goten raises. But if I was getting paid by lines of code to make that salary, the other guy would probably be have a salary qualifying him for extreme poverty.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be accurate for proprietary commercial software, but it is definitely not applicable to something like the Linux Kernel, or many well known and popular OSS applications.

Your logic is, if you are being paid per line of code, then you just write more lines of code...but with OSS someone will just implement a cleaner version of the code. If the LOC issue keeps popping up, then the person trying to write MORE code rather than better code would probably be remove from the projects commit list. The same would apply to someone trying to write every routine in assembler to gain a greater LOC payment.

If all you are doing is spending hours writing hard to maintain assembler for something that is easily accomplished in a few lines of C code, or has no overall impact on performance, then you will be replaced.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, don't. GP kind of missed the point. TFA is not suggesting that programmers should be payed by lines of code (IOW it's not to encourage verbosity) but it is using it as a fairly good predictor of actual costs.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[SL Baur]

Saying programmer A is more valuable then programmer B because programmer A wrote more lines, is of course stupid.

Agreed.

In my own recent case, programmers A and B would be the same person. I've had negative productivity in my current assignment based on SLOC written, however I've identified and removed thousands of lines of source code no one was using and/or was broken for a year or more without anyone noticing.

One must be very careful in assigning critical value to SLOC produced when in the long term, a successful software project will have much, much more time and money spent on maintenance.

It is like the difference of saying. Democrats want to raise your taxes, is in the Macro true. However saying Oboma, a democrat, wants to raise your taxes isn't necessarily true.

Odd, I thought Obama was in trouble because he wants to raise taxes and "spread the money around". Best to keep politics out of a technical discussion.

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[SL Baur]

A clear difference in productivity.

He had the harder job ...

Re:Paying programmers by lines of code...

[Davidis]

That explains the A380.

Erm!

[cosmocain]

[...]to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars[...]

I'd rather build it in C with a modest compiler.

Re:Erm!

[internerdj]

Yes but it would be much much larger given the size of today's dollar...

Re:Erm!

[ColdWetDog]

Yes but it would be much much larger given the size of today's dollar...

And it would crash, hard, every couple of years and you would need the federal government to reboot it. Not a good idea. Go with the C compliler.

Re:Erm!

[Anonymous Coward]

[...]to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars[...]

I'd rather build it in C with a modest compiler.

Hacking is all about doing things the original designer never intended ;)

Lucky for them people did it for free...

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise whatever corporation would have created it for 10.8B would have needed to sell it to nearly 200 million people at 50 bucks a pop to have broken even. Most likely they would have folded.

What a ridiculous sum pulled completely out of thin air.

Re:Lucky for them people did it for free...

[j-pimp]

Otherwise whatever corporation would have created it for 10.8B would have needed to sell it to nearly 200 million people at 50 bucks a pop to have broken even. Most likely they would have folded.

What a ridiculous sum pulled completely out of thin air.

Well its a good initial number. If you would like to refine, go ahead. Yes there are problems with the number. It doesn't take into account the lines of code thrown away, or that you should probably rate lines of code for different programs at different salary levels.

Even using this approach for the Windows code base would have problems. Just the fact that the code was developed over a period of time and subsets were present in older versions of the code. Also, the cost to rewrite it all from scrap might be cheaper.

Re:Lucky for them people did it for free...

[jedidiah]

Otherwise whatever corporation would have created it for 10.8B would have needed to sell it to nearly 200 million people at 50 bucks a pop to have broken even. Most likely they would have folded.

What a ridiculous sum pulled completely out of thin air

It's hardly rediculous. Although it does show the value of Free Software.

Many of us are old Atari or Amiga users are well acquainted with the problems of good products surviving in the marketplace.

Re:Lucky for them people did it for free...

[CraftyJack]

Well its a good initial number. If you would like to refine, go ahead. Yes there are problems with the number.

Open source accounting too?

Re:Lucky for them people did it for free...

[j-pimp]

Well its a good initial number. If you would like to refine, go ahead. Yes there are problems with the number.

Open source accounting too?

Yes open source of sorts. The way the number was determined was rather simple. Lines of code, average programmer salary and LOC/programmer/timesegment. Come up with a method you feel is more accurate.

I'd rather see...

[thered2001]

...a similar estimate for the kernel alone. Or, perhaps a more generalized number which would take into account other distros.

Re:I'd rather see...

[mentaldingo]

RTFA. It said $1.4b for the kernel alone.

Re:I'd rather see...

[Anonymous Coward]

PWNED!

Re:I'd rather see...

[yfkar]

Oh, come on.

Why read the article? I just wait for the summary of the next dupe hoping it will contain more information from the article.

Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[maillemaker]

I wonder if I can spend some of my karma down at Taco Bell for a burrito?

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[qwertphobia]

Nope... but the Phillies got you a free taco last night!

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[Sponge Bath]

No, but when you die you will be reborn at Taco Bell *as* a burrito.
That's karma!

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[betterunixthanunix]

Sort of. If you have good will among your friends, they might just cover some food for you, pick up your bar tabs, etc. How this is relevant to a large corporation, I do not know, and even less so for Fedora 9.

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Rays did. Taco Bell gives everyone a taco for a stolen base. It was a Rays player who stole a base last night.

Go Phils!

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[lattyware]

If you have a good trading history with a company, that implies you are more likely to get more contracts/sales with them. It's not tangible, but it's a real thing none-the-less.

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[Abreu]

I'm glad you finally figured out what Karma is, Randy!

Now let's go over to Crabman's for a beer!

Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset?

[marcosdumay]

No, but you could sell it (rent the account) to an astroturf and pay a burrito.

How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[seeker_1us]

According to an Inquirer article, the estimates were about $10 billion.

I would think it would cost more than $10.8 billion to develop FC9 from scratch then...since it's a better OS.

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and if PulseAudio had worked properly, it would've been worth even more.

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[somersault]

At last! We finally live in the days when money throwing money at a project can magically make the results better!

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are forgetting that 80% of the $10 billion for vista went to PHB salaries.

(also, inquirer's numbers based on $200,000 per person, while FC9 numbers based on $75,000 per person)

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[Sockatume]

Your better OS = more expensive rationale does not include the elusive "throw money down a hole" factor of marketing. Gates-meets-Seinfed and I'm-a-PC combined cost $300m, fully 3% of that entire budget.

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[Sockatume]

Hold on, that makes no sense in this context.

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

His coffee machine is broken.

Re:How much money did MS spend on Vista?

[neuro88]

In fact, it did cost more. About .8 billion more.

Only $427.33 on eLance

[Peter Cooper]

I bet if you put the specs on eLance, there'd be a company in Romania somewhere bidding to do it for about $427.33, give or take a few dollars :)

Re:Only $427.33 on eLance

[ePlus]

Well C is the most spoken language in Romania. ;)

Re:Only $427.33 on eLance

[kestasjk]

I bet if you put the specs on eLance, there'd be a company in Romania somewhere bidding to do it for about $427.33, give or take a few dollars :)

I've had my open source code plagiarized and sold on as their own work by a Romanian "development" company called fyb.ro (though they sold it on for ~$4000 and my code is rather less than the linux kernel), but in principle I actually wouldn't be surprised at all. :-)

Re:Only $427.33 on eLance

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they would be outbid by someone from Finland.

Re:that'd be one expensive hat

[mentaldingo]

yeah we should put a cap on that price

Reliable numbers?

[Gizzmonic]

I don't mean to sound cynical, but this calculation seems about as contrived as the RIAA's "billions lost to piracy" numbers. $11 billion?

Also, if that's all it cost, why hasn't Microsoft made Linux yet?

Re:Reliable numbers?

[Tubal-Cain]

They don't want to.

Also, they have completely different goals in software development. A MS programmer is doing whatever they have been told to do, and it is intended for use by the somewhat distant consumer.
A Linux programmer is either trying to improve something for himself or for the company he works for. Either way, he is much closer to the end-users for feedback.

Re:Reliable numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mean to sound cynical, but this calculation seems about as contrived as the RIAA's "billions lost to piracy" numbers. $11 billion?

Actually the number doesn't sound totally unreasonable to me. Compared to other major infrastructure projects, $11 billion over the course of 10-20 years is actually pretty small when you consider how widely open source software is used in industry. I mean, more money was probably spent on the electricity to run those computers and the buildings to house them than on developing the software. So $11B is not really out of line, in fact it's kind of a low estimate.

Re:Reliable numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because open source doesn't sit well with Microsoft.

And as I've said before....

[Patchw0rk F0g]

Man, I'm in the wrong business... :0

Re:And as I've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in this business and I don't make anywhere near 70k / year.

Re:I don't have smart comment to say

[mentaldingo]

Kind of glad I saved my $10.8b and got my OS off bittorrent.

Grinding

[tepples]

You make $3.78/hr ?

Or twice that per hour and half the hours, while working part-time to grind experience. Worse, I had to work for two years for $0/hr as a regular volunteer for the local veterans' hospital before employers would see past the symptoms of my (mostly controlled) mental illness.

Re:Grinding

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse, I had to work for two years for $0/hr as a regular volunteer for the local veterans' hospital before employers would see past the symptoms of my (mostly controlled) mental illness.

I don't mean to sound offensive but what mental illness requires such investment on your part? Again, I mean no offense to you (shame on potential employers, though)

Re:Grinding

[internerdj]

This coupled with his salary tends to make me think his job market is similar to the one when I first got out of school. Employers are looking for ways to make the employees feel their below average salaries are really average salaries. I applied several times for an entry level job that sat open on a particular company's website for a year and a half, I had been doing everything in the req except for ADA academically for years but not even a call. The "we would rather not hire anyone than fill an open job with someone without professional experience" attitude for an entry level job really gets me. My current employeer does it to. If they are completely incompetant fire them. It isn't like they are going to destroy the world if it is entry level and they screw up.

Re:Grinding

[feldicus]

I've had similar reservations on the part of employers because I'm bipolar. Thankfully, my boss decided to trust me somewhat, so I didn't get this kind of a shaft.

feldicus

Re:Grinding

[tepples]

what mental illness requires such investment on your part?

I blame my former unemployment on a combination of 1. poor interview performance due to my failure to completely hide a mild case of autism, 2. a surplus of labor in my sector four years after the height of the dot-com bubble, when people who had gone to university for the money were graduating, and 3. restricting my job search to within reasonable public transport distance of my relatives.

Re:Grinding

[OrangeTide]

If I had a nickle for every time I heard a geek claim Aspergers, I'd have roughly 500 cents.

"A comprehensive assessment involves a multidisciplinary team that observes across multiple settings, and includes neurological and genetic assessment as well as tests for cognition, psychomotor function, verbal and nonverbal strengths and weaknesses, style of learning, and skills for independent living." .. I'm not saying this was not done for you specifically. But generally when I hear someone claiming this, it is some bullshit self diagnosis and means nothing.

as for #2 and #3, I'm sorry to hear that. I symapthize

Re:Grinding

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good, another aspie to disregard the opinion of.

Re:Grinding

[BattleApple]

Someday we'll have a name for every possible personality quirk. I have an intense aversion to pruney fingertips from taking long showers.. I wonder what they'll call that? Incidentally, I've already found a cure - (shorter showers)

Re:Grinding

[timbck2]

Is it necessary to inform potential employers that you're bipolar? I don't see the need.

FWIW, I'm bipolar too. But my meds keep it completely under control.

Re:Grinding

[OrangeTide]

Well damn, all this time I was wearing latex gloves.

Plus you save on water too.

What's the name for the personality quirk where you hate mainstream political parties? Cuz I have that one.

Re:Grinding

[feldicus]

It isn't necessary, but I decided that it didn't make sense to try and keep it under the vest. I'm pretty open about it, and even though my meds keep it under control 99% of the time, it's better for them to know that I'm not just slacking off.

feldicus

Re:Grinding

[Anonymous Coward]

The only bipolar person i know (medicated) was actually a machine at work. Very ocd.

Spent money like the plague tho, so never was able to save the income she brought in :/

Re:Grinding

[fishbowl]

>Is it necessary to inform potential employers that you're bipolar?

There is no way to find out, even. HIPAA makes it a confidential matter. And if the employer's insurance company discloses medical information without your consent to anybody, you've got a federal case where people stand to lose their license to practice medicine.

Unless you disclose the issue, or waive your rights, there's no disclosure.

Don't put the big bottle of lithium on your desk, right?

Re:Grinding

[BattleApple]

oh man, I have that too... I suggest we form a support group.

Re:Grinding

[((hristopher _-*-_-*]

True.

However, it's quite devastating for someone that has some kind of genuine disorder to be made to feel hurt and not believed.

All I can say, is to anyone that might have such an issue. These forums are not the place to post them.

Re:Grinding

[mhall119]

I wouldn't exactly call Asperger's an illness. However, since you're a geek on the spectrum, take a look at my current project: http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/
I'm making a custom Ubuntu distro for young kids, specifically kids with special needs, like Asperger's.

Re:Grinding

[mrdoogee]

Doesn't the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Preclude them from using that as a bar to employment? Or is ADA toothless when it come to mental illness?

Re:Grinding

[feldicus]

I'm pretty sure it's illegal to deny employment based on it, yeah. I'd just rather people know. I'm no good at making excuses.

feldicus

Re:Grinding

[Anonymous Coward]

If they really needed the employee, they'd pay more or lessen some of the restrictions. The fact that neither is happening says the company doesn't want anyone decent.

Re:Grinding

[Artifakt]

I suggest we form a support group.

Best description of the Libertarian party Evah!

Re:Grinding

[internerdj]

In a job market with high-unemployment companies can get away with it.

Re:Grinding

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not showing up for interviews in your "I AM BIPOLAR" t-shirt, how on earth could it come up? Do they really ask "Do you have any mental illness" (without the qualifier "that would impede you from your job" - from the sounds of things, you'd be fine to say "no").

Re:Grinding

[Fulcrum of Evil]

If I had a nickle for every time I heard a geek claim Aspergers, I'd have roughly 500 cents.

I had some people speculate that I had assburgers at one point, but the symptoms don't fit - I like being around people and am fairly intuitive and empathic, which is a polar opposite to assburgers. It just worked out that I was socially awkward for whatever reason and needed some practice in small talk (people have said that a conversation with me can be exhausting due to the mental effort required, which doesn't go over well at a party). I expect that I'm far from unusual in that regard, and it's easier to claim a trendy condition than admit to being awkward.

Re:Grinding

[ITJC68]

This is so true. How many times do you read on a job board like dice.com that it is an entry level position but they want a BS is something and so many years experience and pay less then 40K a year!!! FOR a BS degree... I think they are smoking crack or something but I read this all the time. Then to read news stories about some jobs that employers can't fill. DUH. Loosen the restrictions some and you might get someone worth 2 cents. My employer hired me through a temp agency. They would have hired me on before the hours of the contract were up but it was going to cost too much. Then after my hire they hired someone off the street thinking they could save a buck and he didn't last 90 days!!! Instead of such steep requirement hire through a temp agency or put it up front that you will be temp to hire but lower the restriction.

Re:Grinding

[glittalogik]

Your cure is unpatentable, and therefore dangerous. Expect a call from the FDA.

Re:Grinding

[Anonymous Coward]

ZIIING!

Re:Grinding

[Hordeking]

Doesn't the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Preclude them from using that as a bar to employment? Or is ADA toothless when it come to mental illness?

Well, it's toothless insofar as all they have to do is say "We didn't feel like he would work in our company." or "He just wasn't what we were looking for."

Of course, the HR people would likely also be covered by ADA if they're stupid enough to tell someone that's why someone weren't hired.

Lines =! quality =! true cost

[nurb432]

Thats not a fair comparisons of cost.

Especially since you are comparing lines of code in OSS to lines of code in CSS, Its like comparing 2 fruits, they are close, but not the same.

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[WDot]

So what you would be saying, in effect, is that comparing open-source code to closed-source code is like... Comparing apples and oranges? (:

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[nurb432]

I was trying to avoid that cliche :)

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[Tubal-Cain]

Call it a meme and you can ramble on about it forever and still be modded Funny.

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure they are not the same, but if you're unable to say which one is more expensive, then they much be close enough.

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[convolvatron]

so you've worked on both kinds. if i gave you 1000 lines of code, minus the legal garbage, you could tell me which is which then?

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[nurb432]

Actually, yes i have worked on both free and commercial code and its not fair to compare the two in line count=dollars.

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[WDot]

That's why I ticked the "no karma bonus" checkbox. I just couldn't resist. (:

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[Narnie]

I'm having a hard time following what you're saying. Do you have a car analogy handy?

Re:Lines =! quality =! true cost

[SL Baur]

I'm having a hard time following what you're saying. Do you have a car analogy handy?

Microsoft Windows is like a kit car put together by one person inside of a big black building with no windows.

Linux is like the US space shuttle built by zillions of different contractors and assembled by NASA in a big building with windows.

Sorry, that's the closest I can get.

What Linux is worth

[PearsSoap]

Fedora 9: $10.8B

Linux Ecosystem: $25B

Free Software: Priceless.

What is a trademark's value called?

[tepples]

Goodwill only shows up on the balance sheet when an acquisition or some similar event occurs which creates a discrepancy between the purchase amount and the balance sheet of the acquisition.

If "goodwill" is not the right word for the value of intangible assets such as trademarks, what is?

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[Kohath]

If "goodwill" is not the right word for the value of intangible assets such as trademarks, what is?

Start by picking some word that doesn't already have a specific alternate meaning in the same context.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[profplump]

"Goodwill" is a specific subset of "intangible assets". Other items such as patents, copyrights, trademarks or other contractually transferable rights or privileges would be in the same category, but are not "goodwill", which has a specific meaning in accounting.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[Otter]

That's exactly the sort of thing "goodwill" includes. But, as the OP says, that value has to arise from a transaction. (For example, you spend $100M to buy a company with $80M in assets and book the remaining $20M as goodwill.) You can't just invent a number and apply it to your own balance sheet.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[WhiteWolf666]

Uh, Goodwill is the correct term.

Has GP looked at GE's balance sheet?

GE claims $4.5 billion in "Licenses, Patents, and Trademarks". While the GP is correct that these values primarily arise as a function of acquisitions or sale of assets, the only time that corporate evaluations really matter is during acquisitions, sale of assets, and other forms of stock/ownership valuations.

Let me put it the way GE puts it (and GE is the *gold standard* when it comes to Goodwill, except for perhaps the Federal Reserve, who has a totally invented balance sheet.) There are 9 companies with triple A credit ratings, and GE's ability to manage accurately manage goodwill is one of the reasons it is a triple A rated company.

Upon closing an acquisition, we estimate the fair values of assets and liabilities acquired and consolidate the acquisition as quickly as possible. Given the time it takes to obtain pertinent information to finalize the acquired companyâ(TM)s balance sheet, then to adjust the acquired companyâ(TM)s accounting policies, procedures, books and records to our standards, it is often several quarters before we are able to finalize those initial fair value estimates. Accordingly, it is not uncommon for our initial estimates to be subsequently revised.
Emphasis added for the benefit of readers.

You *do* just stick those things on your balance sheet; the issue is being able to justify them. If I put my good name on a financial statement to a bank, the bank probably won't take me seriously, unless my name is something like "Warren Buffet". If my name is "GE", and I "give" that name to some business effort, it is a very serious transaction with serious financial consequences, and I can potentially use that to either buy or sell assets, as well as finance offers, and issue debt.

The credibility of the "good will", and the managers who evaluate the relevant values is what determines the financial values of those intangibles. They're only intangible in that they are intellectual concepts, and in many ways are just as "real" as stock or other corporate paper holdings.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[Red Flayer]

You *do* just stick those things on your balance sheet; the issue is being able to justify them

Not if you want to remain free from investigation of fiscal impropriety (as a catch-all term for the various statutes you'd be violating).

Goodwill is a "soft" number a lot of time, in the sense that it is subjective -- however, there are USGAAP methods required for calculating goodwill based on estimates of future profitability (which is the whole process of valuation). When your balance sheet indicates a value less than an independent valuation, you need to state the difference as goodwill. A subsequent reduction in external valuation, or increase in book valuation, means that you need to reduce the value of your goodwill (this is done because goodwill is no longer amortized in USGAAP).

You're probably aware of all this... but it's mistaken to say that you just plop a goodwill number onto your balance sheet. That number is derived from elsewhere, if you play by the rules.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[kesuki]

your own post suggests that past history suggests that GE has been very good at Correctly Valuing 'goodwill' on balance sheets in a real world stock market valuation proposition.

so they're not making up numbers. they're taking numbers and applying them to facts that are known to insiders, and creating a number that approximates the real value in dollars of that factual information.

knowledge is power, and in this case, power equals money. it's the calculation of how much knowledge equals how much power, and what the real value in dollars is.

for instance, if i took the past 2 weeks of stock variation into a time machine with $1,000 dollars i would now assuming i took the least aggressive moves at most 4 points in the day, i would at the end of those 2 weeks before fees have $1500-$2,000 if i pathed out an exact map minute by minute into a computerized trading account, i could probably have $20,000 if i further took advantage of foreign markets, i could have $100,000 in 2 weeks of statistical data send 2 weeks back in time. who says a yo-yo market is a bad thing?

if i just know that every week people are going to panic sell every time dow hits 9,000 and panic buy every time dow hits 8500 or below, i can probably wind up with $200 in gain (20%) without a time machine. they made currency and commodity markets for a reason man, for a reason.

the longer the cycle goes on the more money made.. panic selling coupled with panic buying only shafts those who aren't predicting it. although god help the hedge fund managers they're having a fucking migraine every day. humans even with computers aren't made to predict the volatility of a global recession.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[francisstp]

It would generally be listed under "Intangible Assets" under fixed assets. The value of trademarks would be found in the notes, however internally generated intangibles are not measurable and thus not considered an asset.

Goodwill is specifically the premium paid over the assets of a company during acquisitions.

This is the way it works under GAAP anyway.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux article discusses the cost of development, not a fictional "corporate value" thus, the concept of goodwill cannot be applied.

Conceptually, however, if Linux were a corporation it would have no goodwill on its fictional balance sheet unless it has acquired another entity which had a fair value lower than the cash or equivalent tendered by the purchasing corporation. Thus goodwill is not the correct term even in reference to the concept of an imaginary corporate balance sheet for Linux.

Goodwill is not "real" and has no "real" worth like stocks do, one cannot trade in "goodwill." It is a balancing item created for financial statements.

Accountants use the term "goodwill" as the discrepancy between price paid and value of acquired entities. The text you cited discusses the fair value of an acquired entity and the difference between that value and the amount paid for that entity, which has nothing to do with your rambling statement about a "good name."

Just because GE uses what it warns is a loose estimate for the short term definition of "fair value" does not mean that they "just stick those things on [their] balance sheet."

Because these estimates are sometimes wrong and the fair value of an acquired entity is reduced, GE included the warning about their estimates of fair value.

When lenders evaluate a company's financial statements for information, they know that the items are independently audited, and that is why lenders "trust" the items. Goodwill has only tangential relevance to this process, in that misrepresentation of the value of goodwill on the balance sheet would cause the balance sheet to be misstated. A lender will not extend more capital to a corporation with a high "goodwill" on its balance sheet, rather, it might conclude that the corporation has poorly overspent on acquiring entities, and reduce the capital offered.

Bored Accountant
PS. For further information, please read SFAS 142 by the FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board).

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Goodwill" is technically the difference between a company's book value and the value paid, at the point of execution. Nothing more, nothing less. So it doesn't just mean "brand value" or "intangible assets" - it means all of that stuff. and it gets amortized per any other asset to take the capital back to book.

Re:What is a trademark's value called?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't just put those things on your balance sheet. It is called a balance sheet because it has to balance. You can't go making up numbers on your asset side and then go fiddling with your equity to make it balance out.

Good will exists after acquisitions, when the purchasing price exceeds the book price. Why did you spend the extra to acquire the company? Good Will, even though it wasn't really your good will that caused you to pay more.

Imagine...

[parvenu74]

Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?

Re:Imagine...

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Yes,
since the people funding military adventures and bailing out wall street shouldn't really be funding operating system development. Besides, how much money is SELinux worth by these metrics? The NSA funded that.

Re:Imagine...

[WK2]

Firefox and the Debian dunc-tank experiment have demonstrated that money does not necessarily make open source projects better.

Re:Imagine...

[Siberwulf]

I'm not in the military, so I'm speaking out of my ass here.

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

Re:Imagine...

[lattyware]

Actually, I tried this last week, turns out he turned into a communist and dropped the religion thing. So, you, sir, are incorrect.

Re:Imagine...

[Siberwulf]

Well I stand corrected. Do you have to hit them in any specific location?

Re:Imagine...

[Reality Master 101]

Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?

To take the military: Forget, for a second, contemporary specifics of what you may or may not support. But in general, what is your freedom worth? Do you really think that you would still have it if the American military decided to completely disband? How long do you think it would take for a World War to spring up?

Do you know why we haven't had another world war since 1945? You can thank the American military for that. There is absolutely no question Europe would have had another world war if we hadn't stationed troops through the region. And Europe might be slightly more civilized today (France, for example, is probably not going to get another Napoleon, but then, you never know with the insane French who think they are still relevant and powerful), but there are still expansionist countries and old hatreds still abound.

Of course, if the American military disbanded, I would give it 10 years before some country do a full-blown invasion of the USA.

Unfortunately, Americans are so spoiled and our memories are so short, that we think there are no bad guys in the world.

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source works precisely because of free will, not coercion. It is the principle of voluntary association that makes it all happen. Open source programmers, users, and other participants have adopted the open source model because they chose to purely out of free will.

Government, in contrast, is founded on the principle of coercion. Everything and anything government does is, at the root, achieved through government's special right to employ coercion as a means. How could this possibly benefit the established model of pure openness which is open source? Forcing a person to fund, contribute to, use, or otherwise support open source software isn't just immoral, it's completely backwards and opposite to how open source works.

The worst thing that could happen to open source is to inject coercion into the system, because coercion has no place in the system. No thanks, government is large and powerful enough as it is without taking on yet another funding, spending, and enforcement scheme.

Re:Imagine...

[megrims]

Note: Probably just nit-picking.

Unfortunately, Americans are so spoiled and our memories are so short, that we think there are no bad guys in the world.

This is a fairly common mindset, but it seriously contradicts the nominally scientific, objective and reasonable worldview that we idealise.

There can be no such thing as a bad guy: value-judgements are almost always out of place in conventional language, and this kind of (unconscious) hate-mongering seriously contributes to war and other cultual conflict.

You disagree with them? Sure. They're bad? Unlikely.

Re:Imagine...

[Reality Master 101]

There can be no such thing as a bad guy: value-judgements are almost always out of place in conventional language, and this kind of (unconscious) hate-mongering seriously contributes to war and other cultual conflict.

Oh, please. Do the "bad guys" think they're bad? Probably not. But who cares? Leaders of countries who practice genocide are "bad guys". Leaders of countries who invade other countries for expansionist goals are "bad guys". Roving gangs of men in Africa who steal children are "bad guys". Terrorists who ram airplanes into skyscrapers are "bad guys".

Bottom line, nothing personal, but your attitude is what I'm talking about. You have no perspective that there really are maniacs in the world with no interest in stable civilization. They want personal glory at any cost. Tell the twins that Dr. Mengele was sewing together or one of the people whose eyes he injected dye into to try and turn them blue that there are no bad guys in the world. After all, who are we to judge his cultural differences? Maybe in his culture it's okay to do these sort of medical experiments. /sarcasm

Generalizations are bad. Specific criticism of individuals or cultures is not.

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

However, not travelling to their country and agitating the locals *would* help a lot there and cost even less...

Re:Imagine...

[schlick]

I'm not in the military, so I'm speaking out of my ass here.

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

Chuck Norris could.....

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thoughts like that are what keep OSS down. Because everyone's perception of the OSS crowd as out of touch zealots... You're almost a cliche.

Re:Imagine...

[Ant P.]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

Maybe not, but then neither does throwing half the west's military force at them seem to have any effect.

Re:Imagine...

[thorayi]

Hilarious! You should try standup...You are the Nerd Up today!

Re:Imagine...

[rrohbeck]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

I don't know. If you sharpen the edges of the CD really well and are good at throwing frisbees...

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber with military adventures either.

Re:Imagine...

[megrims]

I don't think it's a matter of saying something is okay or not here. By refusing to make moral judgement upon people, I am doing neither. I make no statement about whether I approve or not.

Further, I am not suggesting that criticism is a problem. Moral judgement has other connotations: some of them appear to be primal (or some such); some of them are just simplistic. You can see similar on the 6:30 news, invited into the minds of our respective populations.

I'm not talking about ignoring destructive behaviour. Personally, I intend to do whatever I am able to do in order to prevent some of the things that go on in this world, but I am unable to reconcile with social manipulation, no matter the cause.

A couple of reasons:

There doesn't appear to be any rational reason to attribute evil to anyone, it's just a way to bind your emotion to your argument. The problem with this is that emotion doesn't even pretend to be objective. It is not a place from which to stand when offering "justice".

Maniacs are not less than human; if you want to, you can disassociate by labelling them as evil, or bad, or some other less-than, but you're contributing as much of a problem as you are trying to avoid.

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

That kind of shit would stop really fast if the kids had any prospects at all in life. So yeah, Fedora 9 would probably help if done properly.

Re:Imagine...

[SL Baur]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

Give her Fedora 9 cds from the point of release. The versions of KDE 4 and Firefox 3 (beta) they used would blow up long before the suicide bomber could get to you. Clearly you have misunderestimated Fedora 9's[1] stability :-(.

[1] I'm typing this on a Fedora 9 system.

Re:Imagine...

[mikechant]

Of course, if the American military disbanded, I would give it 10 years before some country do a full-blown invasion of the USA.

Unlikely; the almost unimaginably massive preparations for such an invasion would be so obvious and long drawn out that the US, with its massive resources, would have plenty of time to re-establish a purely defensive military. It's much more likely that there would be multiple attacks on various US-supported governments around the world.

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.

It would be at least as effective as our current approach.

But how much is that per-copy?

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like a lot of money at first, but ten billion dollars divided by infinity is still zero.

But it wouldn't

[91degrees]

Fedora contains a lot of redundancy. throwing in several text editors makes sense if they're already there and free, but you wouldn't rewrite emacs, joe, Vim and nano. You wouldn't rewrite Epiphany, if you'd rewritten Firefox.

The number's a lot bigger than it needs to be.

Re:But it wouldn't

[jedidiah]

Sure you would have "re-written" things.

Windows has/had 3 major competiting brands of office
productivity software.

Perhaps it wouldn't have all be developed by the same
company, but the products themselves would have been
developed. This just highlights the fact that a Linux
distro is no so much just an analog for a copy of
Windows but it also includes a freeware/commercial
equivalent of a Simtel or Tucows archive DVD.

This also exposes the real problem of competing with
Windows or MS-DOS if you are an alternative OS. You
not only have to compete with the core OS you also
have to compete with all of the 3rd party apps.

I'd be curious what the proposed dollar value of the
entire Ubuntu software repository "multiverse" would
be.

Re:But it wouldn't

[betterunixthanunix]

It was common to have multiple editors in proprietary Unix: ed, ex, vi, pico, etc. In fact, the SUS defines some redundancy, for example, including both sed and awk, when awk could do everything that sed does. When the value of those systems is calculated, they don't reduce the number to account for that redundancy.

Re:But it wouldn't

[fahrbot-bot]

...but you wouldn't rewrite emacs...

Which existed *long* before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye - as did many of the tools used to create Linux (like GCC, and other GNU utilities).

Not to troll, but if Linux wasn't around, we wouldn't build it from scratch, we'd simply use something else - like BSD, which was also here before Linux.

Re:But it wouldn't

[Canberra Bob]

Good point but it doesn't go far enough

First we look at what exactly the articles point is? Total development cost for all software included in a Linux distro? So we include every piece of software available in source form for a Linux distro?

Lets go through some of the top 10 packages that this article is claiming had Linux development costs associated with them:
OpenOffice
Started life as StarOffice as proprietary software with a lot of paid development continuing by Sun. This is available on Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIS. Hardly a development cost of Linux.
gcc
The gcc compiler was first released in 1987 before Linux was even conceived. It is available on numerous platforms. Hardly something that came to us due to Linux.
Eclipse
Developed for Java developers. Not exactly something that came to this world thanks to Linux.
Mono
Microsoft did all the r+d of .Net. Mono would not exist if it was not for Microsoft.
Firefox
This is thanks to Mozilla and is available on many platforms. Not exactly something that came about thanks to Linux.

This may be overly critical, however claiming that all these are development costs of Linux because they are available on Linux is like running a heap of open source apps on windows and claiming them as development costs for Windows. Porting something to Linux does not mean the entire development effort for the project is a cost to Linux.

Back to your point - you are quite correct in stating that many of these tools / applications would be available today if Linux had never existed.

Re:that'd be one expensive hat

[somersault]

One more pun like that and they'll never find where you were beret'd.

I think I have to get my eyes checked..

[Anonymous Coward]

I was reading the rss feed and thought it said $10.88. I thought "Wow that's really cheap!". 8|

"Good will" does not mean what you think it means

[John Hasler]

> On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill
> listed as a major asset.

"Good will" is a specialized accounting term when used on balance sheets.

1400 lines/year???

[Anonymous Coward]

So the average programmer makes 75K/y and it is 10,800,000K that means that they estimage that it would take approx 144,000 programmers 1 year to code 204,500,946 lines of code or 1 programmer 144,000 years to code 204,500,946 lines of code... ... Which means that each programmer delivers and grand total of approximate 1400 lines of code/y. Not very impressive. I would think most programmers could do that in a couple of days.

To me it sounds like someone forgot on or two zeroes somewhere.

Re:1400 lines/year???

[YrWrstNtmr]

...approximate 1400 lines of code/y. Not very impressive.

You forget all the other parts of a major project. Analyze, design, test. Those take people and hours away from simply pounding out lines of code.

Re:1400 lines/year???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but 1400 lines/year? Even with analysis, design, and thorough testing most people I have worked with deliver quite a lot more than that number.

1400 is really really low!

Besides -- I bet there were not 144,000 man-years spend on the all the code for FC9.

Sorry, but even with conservative estimates this must be off by a factor 10.

Re:BIZNaTCH

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, fix your bots or turn them the fuck off.

No

[Viol8]

If I want to pay for software I'll buy it , I don't want to have to start paying for it through friggin taxes FFS!

Re:that'd be one expensive hat

[bornyesterday]

i bet it wouldn't be anywhere near bowler, colorado

Maybe they should have used gentoo to build it?

[soundproofing.noise]

I heard Gentoo linux has some sort of autobuild tool that builds everything for the system from scratch, I think it's called e merde or something like that(you can google it yourself if your interested).

What's the point of this?

[sunking2]

I'm not really sure what they are trying to show with this. I'm sure that MS could go and roll up all of there cumulative costs for XP, Vista, or Windows 7 or whatever and show a worthless number that is much more impressive. And they are able to do it as real costs to them and still make a profit, while employing thousands of people. I'm not real sure what this even includes. Are they counting the source to every package that is built into Fedora, ie emacs, all the gnu utils, etc. Are they trying to point out how people are idiots for contributing for free something that Redhat will now tout for their own purpose and profits? Should they advertise it as, people all over the world have saved us billions of dollars to help us profit? What's with the recent posts with really big useless numbers later? Is the Linux community feeling inadequate in a certain area?

Salary

[RAMMS EIN]

When reading this, I couldn't help but wish _I_ got paid that much money. The figure I get from sloccount ($55K) seems high, but this is even higher than that! Anybody want to make me an offer?

Re:Salary

[Shados]

It depends where you live, as it varies widely across states or countries. My fiancee (girl, who because of the way things are, on average, gets paid less than a guy with equivalent experience) in Boston, straight out of school with no experience (no internship aside for Summer of Code, not a single job on her resume, very average GPA), got her first job at 80000$ USD + bonuses and advantages, and got a 5% raise within 4 months.

Now, imagine someone with actual experience, consultants, architects, etc that are paid MUCH more than a programmer straight out of school, and you have it. I, myself (software dev and architect), pushes the 6 digit figures and I don't even have a university degree and I'm not 30 years old yet.

Thats what pushes the average up, compared to the other side of the coins (a programmer without so much as an associate in the middle of nowhere doing minimum wadge for hacking up VB6 legacy code)

Re:Salary

[Anonymous Coward]

You love me longtime & sukisuki, you get this scruffy 5 bux bill.

Re:Salary

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, imagine someone with actual experience, consultants, architects, etc that are paid MUCH more than a programmer straight out of school, and you have it. I, myself (software dev and architect), pushes the 6 digit figures and I don't even have a university degree and I'm not 30 years old yet.

Yes, but you're still in Boston.

Re:I don't have smart comment to say

[lattyware]

Duh, they are talking about the value of the source code, try getting your hands on that!

The Biggest Failure of the Times

[Anonymous Coward]

In many ways, this exorbitant expense represents a terrible failure of the way we do computing. If it would require such an enormous investment just to get our simple digital machines to do something useful, then there is a major problem somewhere.

Computing has gotten far too bloated and wasteful. The typical "desktop" environment is totally unnecessary and its reduction or elimination would allow a much simpler -- and cheaper -- approach. My Linux system is highly minimalistic. (Thankfully Linux does provide that choice.) I don't use either Gnome or KDE, and I shun most GUI front ends, but I can still operate quickly and efficiently for everything that I do.

The basics are cheap. It's the needless accouterments that drive up the overall cost.

Re:The Biggest Failure of the Times

[Anonymous Coward]

:rolleyes: I can get by with just a command line. And 640KiB is more than enough for anybody too. :end-rolleyes:

I happen to like a rich graphical interface and find that it boosts my productivity. And if you have trouble running KDE, you should hop in a dumpster and dig up a PC that's more powerful than a Pentium 75.

the linux institute number is

[nimbius]

just as useful as the number microsoft gives me for how much TCO is for linux.

give me an independent third party.

Re:that'd be one expensive hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, now. There's beanie 'nuff of that talk for one day.

$10.9B...

[ProteusQ]

...and you still suffer dependency hell. Drop RPM's for deb's, and I'll use Fedora.

for 10 billion...

[eniacfoa]

just because something is cost X to make doesn't mean its worth Y. Yes goodwill is an asset but coca cola's goodwill represents hoards of paying customers while linux has not.... For 10 billion dollars I'd expect a few things like how about auto installers?, ive had linux geeks say its impossible and its a windows thing and linux will never be windows, but its more like a modern commercial OS thing in reality - I could have sworn my amigaOS in 1987 had auto installers ( If you had a hard disk...fuck that was a long time ago now... ) and so does mac, so linux geeks, how is it just a windows thing? say its currently impossible - fine, dont say its a windows thing... This also doesnt mean im not pro-linux... i am def pro linux, but i cant ditch windows and use it because I am a pro musician / gamer and linux cant support my audio HW (dont say wine, im a musician not an I.T genius), or give me ports of the best software or give me the latest games...I want to see real money thrown at linux, I just cant see it meeting my computing needs and competing with windows on a real scale until a company turns it into a real product that they sell and make money from. how much does it cost to bribe HW makers to start making drivers and software developers to start porting the best software these days? being 100% free is indeed awesome but its a double edged sword.

Re:"Good will" does not mean what you think it mea

[Sockatume]

Goodwill is an accounting term used to reflect the portion of the book value of a business entity not directly attributable to its assets and liabilities; it normally arises only in case of an acquisition. It reflects the ability of the entity to make a higher profit than would be derived from selling the tangible assets. Goodwill is also known as an intangible asset. [...] The difference between the purchase price and the sum of the fair value of the net assets is by definition the value of the "goodwill" of the purchased company.

(Quoting Wikipedia so of course the true meaning might be something like "a giant catfish from Pluto named Horace, who likes to eat acorns", although this tallies well with other sources.) Anyway, it can imply that the company's reputation etc. increases its value above its "paper" value, but it generally means any nonspecific, hard-to-transfer value in the company which is not directly quantifiable (i.e. not intellectual property).

Make me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

God, all that good money to build such a shit !

Re:that'd be one expensive hat

[somersault]

Yeah, you're right. I wouldn't want to be arrested for dis-turban the peace.

In all seriousness

[JDub87]

Going by this metric... how much did it cost to develop windows? How much did it actually cost?

Re:In all seriousness

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

Vista was about $6.8 billion.

Re:that'd be one expensive hat

[Anonymous Coward]

You mitre-gret it when you found yourself in such serious trouble. You should have a chapeau-rone!

What's an auto-installer?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by auto-installer?

Fedora (what this article tries to value) has had an automatic, unattended OS installation mode for many many years. It actually was in Red Hat before and pre-dates Fedora. Google "fedora kickstart" if you want to know about it.

There is also the yum/RPM system if you are talking about installing applications. This is very similar to the "install wizards" that are used to ship Windows software. What you have to understand is that application software vendors put effort into packaging up Windows apps to have that sort of install wrapper. The OS doesn't somehow do it for them. The same is true of Fedora apps (or Debian). Someone has to do the labor to package up the app binaries to make them suitable for install.

So the right question was how much will you pay someone to repackage apps, if your complaint is that some application you want is not already available in Fedora. I've found that Fedora plus one of the alternate repositories such as Livna or ATrpms gives me all the OSS apps I would want, so I never ever have to download sourcecode and do any manual builds or installs. The only compiling I do is for my work as a software engineer, not as a user of my laptop or workstation. For me, software doesn't exist unless it is already in the repo I am using. It isn't worth my time to download anything else and fiddle about.

Re:What's an auto-installer?

[eniacfoa]

I dont mean this to sound like im complaining as you put it, more like constructive criticism....I mean installer wizards that let joe average double click a file and click next a few times to install a program...and a package manager might be halfway there, but its not good enough for the masses to jump on board. Also, when i say lack of software, i mean things like Pro tools, Cubase, Reason, Ableton live...professional DAWs.... I did say i was a musician. I am not an IT professional... What if you need photoshop (last i heard there wasnt a port?) what if you need other creative software not found on linux? your stuck with windows if you dont like macs...and if you want the latest games your just stuck with windows...(dont tell me apples are good gaming rigs) linux can meet a lot of peoples needs but not mine. I want it to meet my needs of course so I can kiss windows goodbye. how it happens doesnt mean anything to most users, they just use the com, they dont care how it was made or if software developers are responsible for installers or if the OS is. I dont mean it to sound like im bashing linux, thats not my point...my points are, this article makes it sound like the cost of making X means its worth X...and also that linux would probably turn into a real windows/macOS competitor if it was turned into a real product. Can you really convince the industry to jump on board without $$$? thats all they care about in the end...gone are most visionaries like chuck peddle who wanted to change the world and didn't care about money (creator of the 650x line of processors, found in nearly all the early home computers and consoles, even the SNES was 2x 8bit 6502's... He took motorola's CPU design which he had also worked on...and coupled that with a very clever chip manufacturing process, which gave him super high chip yields reducing the price of early CPU's from hundreds of dollars to $25 thus bringing them to your lounge room real fast. He tried to get motorola to fund his vision whilst he worked there, but being a profit machine they didn't like the idea of turning a $300 product into a $25 one...so he left, they sued, he got around em and he helped changed the world. Its amazing how little credit goes to this man, obviously because he didn't end up a bill gates type... he never got any big bucks, in fact he got shafted by commodore - his employers and ended up fairly broke). Does anyone at Dell or HP possess enough vision and balls to push linux to the next level? or do they just like selling PC boxes as if there selling toasters?

Re:What's an auto-installer?

[eniacfoa]

by the way, as a musician, I have no chance of using my firewire audio interface hardware without being able to use wine as far as I can see...roland has no plans for a linux driver. & even if I got my audio hardware working, there is no DAW (digital audio workstaion) on linux with VST support...which is crucial... if linux could come up with some hardware and software support for musicians, it might just find a nice little niche for itself...we computer musicians know enough about computers to know we wouldn't use windows if we had a choice.

Re:What's an auto-installer?

[sydneyfong]

Give it a bit more time.

First it was the basics. The OS, the system tools etc. Then came the easy bits like apache, sendmail, and other various servers. Then the "standard" GUI stuff came, first the window managers, which with xterm was merely a glorified shell. Then the "desktops" came, the file management tools, the browser, standard stuff you can get with your mouse.

That's around 2003. Before that, I had a problem finding a usable BROWSER in Linux (that's when netscape dropped the ball, IE almost at 100% market share and Mozilla (not Firefox) was at version 0.6 or so). At that time Windows already had a huge and established ecosystem for 3rd party software, and back then nobody uses linux anyways, and given the relatively well execution of Win2k and XP compared with vista, nobody except hobbyists and zealots are considering to switch. Given that, 3rd party software vendors may have looked at the possibility of supporting Linux, but most would have deemed the opportunity unripe.

These days software companies really can't ignore Linux, and I'm guessing 3rd party vendors will finally be seriously looking to getting their software running on Linux. This requires development time, and more importantly a paradigm shift. I'm guessing a few years onward you'll finally be seeing professional software that works well on Linux instead of the half-@$$ed solutions now.

At least, that's the theory. In practice, if you need to deal with any kind of hardware support on Linux, you better hire a good developer who knows the Linux kernel and doesn't piss off Linus and his friends. Whereas on Windows you just needed hire a guy who manages to somehow tweak the thing to work on the couple versions of Windows.

Anyway, things will get better. I repeat myself... 6 years ago I was struggling to find a usable BROWSER on Linux. Compare that and professional music software (which maybe 1% of the general public will use?)...

Re:What's an auto-installer?

[eniacfoa]

I know things will get better, its just how much better and how long will it take (while being 100% free). professional creative software is a profitable niche if supported well, just ask apple. Would their computer division have survived the tough times without desktop publishing and pro music software? arguably not. There was a period when if you didn't have a mac in your studio, you were a damn fool. Before those times, if your work was video you had to have an amiga 2000 with a newtek video toaster (1st professional home video studio, 1990, costing 5K, compared to 20K workstations at TV studio's, many low budget TV stations around the world apparently continue to use them and some older guys in big news networks have stated that still nothing today beats it for getting high quality gfx up FAST which is obviously handy in a news environment.)...If your work was audio you had to have an atari ST. I cant tell you how many musicians held onto these and refused to upgrade for years on end, even though PC's and macs were leaving it for dead after atari went bankrupt. They bought a PC with windows 95/98, but they still used their atari ST for their music production for some time, until it was just career suicide not to upgrade...both the amiga and atari had bad management, with amiga's being downright shady on top of incompetent which led to throwing away a technological lead on its rivals and then going bankrupt, but their success came from A- finding a niche and B- latest games/gfx (amiga was the best on the market, PC and mac were crap for games at the time, amiga ports always looked better than atari ST ports too.)...If linux can get a niche and get GFX, it will sell products..and itself for a change...I think it needs to be a sell-able product for that to happen. If you think it can happen while being 100% free, im not knocking you, ive just never heard any one tell me yet, a viable way how it will compete with windows/mac with no money.

Re:What's an auto-installer?

[sydneyfong]

I never said it would be free.

In fact I doubt such things would ever be. The demand for such applications are so low that the overhead cost of development cannot be offset by millions of users through support, donations etc. like Firefox, GNOME, etc. Somebody has to pay.

The calculation is based on false assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pro-linux and all, but no software is developed in a vacuum. Even commercial code is shared between different software and bought from different sources, bringing down the cost of software development considerably. If you want to compare numbers, you have to take that into consideration.

There's an old saying

[Anonymous Coward]

you can't propel yourself forward by giving yourself a pat on the back.

Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Without reading TFA, I can say that this figure is completely ridiculous and was obviously pulled out of someone's ass.

Let's assume that a top-notch software developer costs a company $250000 a year (including taxes, location, equipment etc). This is actually rather on the high side.

At that rate, you could hire 1000 developers for 40 years. Not to put Fedora or any other Linux distro down, but it does *not* take 1000 developers 40 years to re-implement *everything* in it. No way.

then don't

[jandoedel]

then don't build it from scratch...duh

Re:Grinding [Offtopic]

[spxero]

FYI there is a typo on the screenshots page- under the 'Childsplay' screenshot it states "GCompris is another suite of educational games"

I really like the idea and design, although my daughter (no Asperger's) is still a few years from using a computer. Keep up the good work, and I'll revisit the site in a bit!

Dunno, but it's worth something

[Quila]

Through the years car manufacturers have put "Handling tuned by Lotus" on their cars as a selling point. Lotus has immense goodwill on the handling front, as the name is practically synonymous with excellent handling.

Thus the goodwill for Lotus is that manufacturers will continue to come to them for handling expertise (much of Lotus' business is engineering contracts). The reputation (goodwill) ensures repeated business for Lotus and increased sales for their customers who advertise the Lotus involvement. Less money would roll in without that reputation. The company is definitely worth more with that reputation than without.

So the reputation/goodwill must be worth something. How much I leave to the bean counters.

Re:Dunno, but it's worth something

[FireStormZ]

Way to *completely ignore my question* how do you calculate the value of the goodwill associated with a name brand on a balance sheet. Its damn sloppy accounting like that which gets companies into trouble.

Better to only put things on a balance sheet which are not a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess), only use those items if you are attempting to sell something to someone else. e.g. If fedora (the institution) was for sale it would be reasonable to point at its name brand or if fedora was selling their software there is value in the name. But the name value does nothing in keeping the company running beyond that.

Goodwill? WTF?

[phlegmofdiscontent]

The comment at the end of the post, "On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset." irked me. In accounting terms, goodwill isn't the warm fuzzy feeling that corporations hold for us. Goodwill is simply the difference in the book value of an acquired company and the actual sale price. Since the assets of the acquired company need to be added to the balance sheets of the acquiring company at book value, the difference between book and market price needs to be held as a seperate item to keep the book balanced.

The comment at the end made no sense whatsoever and goodwill doesn't even seem to be in TFA, so can anyone explain why it's in the post?

Re:"Good will" does not mean what you think it mea

[skroops]

You go to wikipedia for the definition, and then criticize wikipedia for not being reliable. If you personally consider wikipedia to be a good source for the definition of goodwill, then don't denounce it, appreciate it.

You'd stay with ed till the end of time

[marcosdumay]

That is exactly what happend with proprietary software, the selling price of competitive software is often too low to make sense writting it. Now, when you don't writte the software, you never know what is its potentital, even if it could end up worthing bilions after a few iterations. Competitors are also priced out of the market, because their earlier iterations aren't any good they don't have money to take over the world.

This way, the market becomes too dumb to fullfill most of the ninches, fighting only for the top seller softwares.

That's $52 per line of code...

[MadCow42]

I know we're talking about completely debugged code, and including all the design/architecting costs, but that's a pretty high cost... and at $75k salary, it only equates to 6.5 lines of code per working day, or 1450 lines per year!

Hell - I write more code that that on average over the year, and I'm in MARKETING. :)

MadCow.

Re:That's $52 per line of code...

[systemeng]

The average used in the defense industry is to assume that one programmer can write 10 (ten) lines per day that are fully documented and debugged! Kernel and GUI code are usually considered more difficult than that.

RPM x DEB

[marcosdumay]

Dependency hell is not a feature of the packaging format. To make it go away, you'd need a huge team of developers focused only on making your distro work, and the proper environment.

Even Debian testing sometimes has dependency problems.

Re:RPM x DEB

[ProteusQ]

I'm neither saying you're wrong and nor saying that my experience is universal, but I installed RH/Fedora twice between 2003 and 2008, and both times I erased the install because of dependency hell. OTOH, I have used Kanotix and then Kubuntu on a daily basis since 2002 and have only found one non-standard package that refused to install (in 2007), and that issue got resolved with the next release. At this point, you could not pay me to install Fedora as my working OS. Whether or not RPM's have something to do with this, I would hope that Fedora fans would take note -- I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

$10.88?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else read the title as $10.88? I saw it pop up in my RSS and couldn't believe it. I guess it pays to RTFS

Such BS

[hesaigo999ca]

First of all, take into consideration ALL the lines of code that came from Unix as a given freebie
that should not be calculated, remove all the vendor drivers created by the vendor and not the OS people, as this is not included in the cost of knowing how Windows costs, so why do it in Linux as well (unless they have rewritten them...)

Also remove all the sofwtares that come into play that come from third party but are not really part of the OS. Let's say KDE or Gnome or Grub or Lilo. These were made for any distro by xyz person not currently employed by Fedora to actually cut a paycheck for...

Now how much we talking about.
Don't get me wrong, I am a penguin lover, but I just hate to see that now Fedora is getting in on the blinders game of misrepresentation of their products that we have gotten used to from M$
We don't need another M$ machine, stick with being good guys, loving their penguins(whatever flavor)

Re:Such BS

[GameMaster]

On the other hand, count the number of times each line of code has been re-written and all the lines of code from previous versions of Red-Hat/Fedora that have been removed for one reason or another. No OS can be written without going though a process of continuous revision and improvement so that would be a legitimate part of the development process to be consider towards the cost.

Re:Such BS

[gujo-odori]

That's not misrepresentation, though. If you add up all that Microsoft has spent developing Windows plus software commonly found together with Windows that is not part of the OS itself (such as MS Office), plus the cost of developing whatever third-party apps and drivers are commonly found on Windows machines,I think you'd be in the $10 billion range easily. Look at this way: if Microsoft has 2000 programmers working on Windows and Office (probably ballpark, because there are hundreds who work on Exchange alone; I used to be in Redmond Bldg. 34, so I know what I'm talking about on this) and those programmers make an average of $75K a year, you're at $150 million a year for salaries alone. Figure the value of benefits, stock options and grants, etc., is worth at least half of the salary amount (it's probably more), and you're up to $225 million/year just for programmer compensation, without factoring in all the other costs, like marketing, legal, administrative, etc., and the fact that Microsoft has been developing Windows and Office for way more than 10 years and that $10 billion figure doesn't look so crazy. Factor in other stuff like compilers, Visual Studio and all the other things MSFT develops and I'm sure you'll find they've probably spent *more* than $10 billion on software development over the history of the company.

I know that sounds like a huge number, but at the time I left Microsoft, they had about $75 billion /in cash/.

Re:Such BS

[hesaigo999ca]

We were talking about the OS , not Visual studio or office, and when they say they rewrite code for 64 bit extension or a new server technology, they never do from scratch they just keep developing better and bigger wrappers for those original win32apis we all know and love.

As well, we were not talking about marketing, as this does not count towards the cost of DEVELOPING a software, only making it known. As for third party drivers etc... like I said, those were made by someone else for M$ therefor not directly a cost to M$ development of the OS.

I still think they throw numbers that sound very high and great to make it a ploy for either accounting (tax breaks from gov.) or marketing ...."look we spent THIS much, so it must be good!"

Re:Such BS

[gujo-odori]

No,they are not talking about the OS, they are talking about the distribution, and explicitly said so.

Think marketing doesn't count toward development costs? I can tell right now you're not an accountant.

As for third-party drivers, Microsoft has been known to help defray development costs of drivers.

If you want to count the cost of developing the OS proper only, go ahead. But that's still going to have to include everything you find in Microsoft server OSes, since a Linux distro comes standard with that stuff, plus everything you find in a Microsoft desktop OS, since a Linux distro comes standard with that stuff, too. Development tools, mail server, basically every Microsoft product. Now, go and calculate how much it would cost to develop all of that from scratch, with paid developers, in a proprietary environment, starting now. Think the price will come in at less than $10 billion?

Re:Such BS

[hesaigo999ca]

I will reiterate, this comes from unix, they took lines of code from unix without rewriting, and took it as theirs. This means their software was already pre-developed. Windows on the other hand, didn't quite do that, although they are guilty of repackaging the same thing over and over, there is no such thing as a rewrite from scratch as they would have you believe.

I can create my own flavor of linux, with all the code coming over from the "generic pool" of developed stuff from *nix, and add 500 billion $ of advertising, does that mean it cost me
500 billion$ to develop the software???

I do not agree , and this is just my opinion.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"

Again, it's worth something

[Quila]

That's proven. I'm sure the bean counters have a way of figuring out how much. I'm not a bean counter, and I'm guessing you aren't either, so we really aren't qualified to determine how goodwill would be valued.

Re:Again, it's worth something

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent the morning in an MBA accounting class (yes, cue the boos... and I'm sure no one was saying "Boo-urns"), and while I agree that brand names are very valuable for companies, they have no intrinsic accounting value assigned to them and they aren't on a company's balance sheet.

The balance sheet item called "Goodwill" arises, as smack.addict correctly noted, ONLY appears when there is a positive difference between the price a company pays for an acquisition, and the book value of the company being acquired.

An example to illustrate the meaning of this accounting mumbo-jumbo: even though the name Coca-Cola is obviously valuable, the Goodwill item on Coca-Cola's balance sheet (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=KO) relates to acquisitions that Coke has made over the years. Coke's brand name is estimated to be worth about $100 billion, ten times what the company's assets are worth on its balance sheet.

This is one reason why some smaller firms find it hard to do branding advertising -- brands are valuable, but not to accountants.

Still inflated.

[Punto]

Most of the development can be outsourced, that would cut the "average salary" to at least 1/3.

This is insane!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally ridiculous! Insane and out of this world!!!

How a software project can cost more than 10 BILLIONS?!?!?!?!
Pure thieves, and the company that pays 10 billions to develop a piece of software must be composed by abnormal and stupids.

Give me a break for God's sake!

real cost?

[pak9rabid]

So, if you minus the lines of code that RedHat/Fedora didn't write (upstream projects developers' code), and added in the amount of man-hours associated with packaging/debugging/patching these packages, I wonder what they'd be at.

Probably the capital of Island..

[cheros]

USD 3.50 or so :-)

Joking aside, they did contribute quite a lot in the early day, including inflicting RPM on the population :-)

Re:Probably the capital of Island..

[pak9rabid]

Yea, no hate on RedHat. They are a very respectable company in my opinion. Not only did they not cave to MS's bullshit over a yeat ago, but they have and still do make valuable contributions to the Linux kernel as well as the open source community in general.

Re:I don't have smart comment to say

[netdur]

am glade moderators has great sense of humor, joy

Money can't buy everything

[Seth Kriticos]

That's an interesting calculation, but it ignores the fact, that money can't buy everything.
Sure, you can hire a lot of devs and start writing the system, but the can't get it right the first time.
FC evolved over a long period of time and a lot of testing and learning from past errors where involved until they get where they are.
Some parts are also implemented by specially talented uniqe people hwo just aren't there anymore, and you can't hire them too.
Also FC (or any other peace of software around) is not just the code, but also the history. You can't buy history.
Likewise you can't buy the userbase and the developerbase that use / contribute the system. You have to invest a lot of effort and money to do this.
Now if you say, that you want to create an OS with similar functionality and stability then FC and start to calculate, go on, but the figures will be quite different.

Goodwill As a Major Asset.

[plasmacutter]

Does this mean I can pay my mountainous student debts with good will?

pretty please?

I wonder ...

[Anonymous Coward]

How much money would it take do make a _decent_ disto...

Re:I wonder ...

[mweather]

How many lines of code are in Debian? Do the math.

Counting lines of code means very little

[fortapocalypse]

More code does not equal actual worth.

While it's true from the standpoint of "if we were to write this now how much would it cost to pay developers, etc.", which I know was the point of the report, that just doesn't equate to anything substantial on its own.

Really great things don't necessarily require a lot of code (think JUnit and other similar libraries), and there are a lot of projects and products that had a *ton* of money spent on development that were flops or not so great. While it's true that an OS is obviously a lot more complex than a Java unit testing framework, it doesn't mean that an OS that has 1/2 as many lines of code would be of any less worth than Fedora. I'm not knocking Fedora, but I just think that this whole report is just going down the absolute wrong road, and it scares me to think that anyone in the Linux community would even think it worthwhile to post this kind of stuff. It just makes me think that people have lost their way from the "path of enlightenment".

Re:Goodwill? WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, but incomplete. Goodwill is generally amortized - that is, a portion of it is deducted against revenues over time. The rationale is, you paid more than book value for the assets, and over time the additional payment 'causes' revenue to rise (otherwise, why would have paid more?) so you offset those revenues with the goodwill. It's a makeshift way of accounting for a business judgement (i.e., to pay more than something is 'worth' in a strictly-book sense). It is relevant because such amortization reduces operating income, which reduces taxes. Recall, corporations pay taxes on what they net - not (like US Human persons) on what they gross.

Goodwill is not thie TFA, but is in the post because (I think) there was discussion about the value of the brand in the Fedora product under discussion. Goodwill is only an issue if someone actually bought Fedora from RedHat - you don't get goodwill without a real transaction, and you don't get to 'make up' the number either - it is the numerical difference between what you pay and what is already recorded on the books of the seller. The only impact you can have on goodwill is in terms of what you are willing to pay for it. If you are wrong, then you end up in a situation with 'impaired goowill', which requires writeoffs, and can seriously impact your net income.

Why this figure needs a sack of salt..

[w0mprat]

Seriously, how much of the code of fedora 9 is redundant?. Your average distro is a big collection of gpl code from various smaller projects, and I assume the 10 billion figure is the calculated value of the entire code base. Cutting down on outright duplicated effort and cutting out things that can be left to 3rd parties to develop for your product you could code from scratch an equivalent OS for MUCH less. The only part that would be somewhat unshrinkable would be the kernel, but even that i be simplified.

So cutting off all the fat, I think you could build something close to fedora 9 for under $1bn at full price. Just look at how much functionality can be packed into some of the mini distributions going around, when you choose just to have one browser, one mail client etc etc. That's a clue.

Re:Why this figure needs a sack of salt..

[Weedlekin]

"Cutting down on outright duplicated effort and cutting out things that can be left to 3rd parties to develop for your product you could code from scratch an equivalent OS for MUCH less."

And cutting out all the stuff that was developed for multiple platforms including Linux, was ported to Linux from existing UNIX codebases, or was forked or is otherwise based on an existing codebase reduces that cost even further.

I'd also like to know whether the metric used to calculate LOC included header files or their equivalents in whatever languages are being used, because any reasonable programmer would be expected to write a lot more than 19 lines of header entries / day (I've read the article, and it doesn't say whether they count headers or not). However, it clearly does include (but is not restricted to -- the appendix in the article merely says these are in the top 10 packages in the Fedora distro) the following:

1. two distinct versions of GCC, both of which are multi-platform tools whose origins predate Linux.

2. OpenOffice, another multi-platform package.

3. Eclipse, again multi-platform rather than Linux-specific.

4. Mono. Multi-platform, and a copy of something from Microsoft for Windows whose developers have received significant amounts of help from MS (Icaza worships at the altar of Gates).

5. Firefox. Multi-platform again.

6. Bigloo, a multi-platform Scheme implementation.

7. ParaView, another multi-platform app.

So out of that top 10, we're left with two items that were actually developed for Linux, i.e. the kernel, and RedHat's own Enterprise Security Client. Add in the complete lack of clarity about whether they're counting headers as LOC, and it's difficult to reach any conclusion other than that the figures given in the white paper are utter BS.

"So cutting off all the fat, I think you could build something close to fedora 9 for under $1bn at full price"

You could do it for a lot less than that when you consider how much of what's in even the mini distros you cite is either multi-platform stuff that would have already been there if Linux didn't exist, or is a direct port, a fork, or is derived in some other way from a codebase that already existed elsewhere (i.e. outside Linux and software that's specifically been developed for it).

NB: another area where the BS creeps in is by assigning US development costs to large bodies of code that were not written exclusively in the US, and in some cases, have no input from US-based programmers at all.

what about the value of 100 test-release cycles?

[Coop]

The average line of code in industry is of much lower quality than the average line of code in FC9. Some of the GNU utilities and libraries have been polished up for 20 years, the kernel for 15, X for 20 years, etc. Code that is on its first release is often in production use in industry, but seldom used in any of the big distros -- that's the *other* 100 million lines of code sitting out there in the free software world. So I guess that $10.8B is low by a factor of two or three compared to the money it would cost to develop such a polished product if Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or Oracle were to attempt it.

Would a commercially-developed product...

[Chris Snook]

...really include p0rn-comfort?

garbage in garbage out

[spir0]

this is a complete load of junk. this must be some backhanded effort to try and boost Fedora's or Redhat's stock up.

anyone writing this completely misses the point of a distro and how a distro is installed on a PC.

Fedora/Redhat didn't write the kernel, they didn't write any of the GNU apps, they didn't write X, they didn't write openoffice, they didn't write any of the 3rd party apps that make the distro complete. And nor would anyone.

that's the problem with pulling stuff out of your arse -- you end up with a handful of shit.

Re:garbage in garbage out

[Limburgher]

Actually, Red Hat do contribute hugely to the community, especially the kernel. Google Alan Cox. RH employee.

Re:garbage in garbage out

[spir0]

I'm fully aware of that. But contributing to a kernel and writing a complete one from scratch are two separate things. Maybe they could though, I don't know.

Software costs $53 per line

[jcbottorff]

If I do the math, $10.8 billion dollars divided by 204,500,946 lines of code I get a little under $53 per line of code.

Studies of software development productive frequently come up with a number like 10,000 lines of code per programmer man-year. A recent large project I read about at Cisco, doing system level code, I seem to remember saying more in the 7500 lines of code range per programmer man-year.

If we do the math again, 204,500,946 lines of code divided by 7500 lines per programmer man-year, gives a little over 27,000 man years. If we take the claimed cost, $10.8 billion and divide by 27,000 man years, that gives $400,000 per programmer man-year.

Also for a little reality check, Microsoft's R&D budget is around $8 billion/year now, so Microsoft would have the financial resources to write the equivalent of Fedora 9 every 16 months.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this possibly be why we don't see any new major Linux distros built from scratch?

Why don't they post something about how much Windows 7 would cost if MS developed it from scratch?

goodwill listed as a major asset

[Kanasta]

BS. goodwill can only be listed if it is bought - ie buying a firm with $1m physical assets for $2m - $1m is goodwill - WHICH STILL DEPRECIATES. Of course maybe US accounting standards allow companies to make up a figure whenever they want. In which case my company, which I just invented 3min ago, has a goodwill assets worth $10m and therefore has total assets worth $10m and $2 (I donated my pen to it).

So, by the same calc how much is Windows worth?

Yes, they were lucky, but we did it for ourselves

[SL Baur]

What a ridiculous sum pulled completely out of thin air.

It's not out of the question. Given current software development cost models, the Linux kernel will cost about a billion US$ to redevelop soon http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html

Given the fraction of the code base of a complete system that the kernel is, I'd say US$10.8B if anything is on the low side, if one were to do it again from scratch and pay for the development.

PLZ buy my crap

[Anonymous Coward]

My crap worth $30 billion, but who's gonna buy :(

Re:Grinding [Offtopic]

[mhall119]

Thanks for spotting the typo, it's been corrected. That's what happens when you try to put something together from scratch in a day.

How old is your daughter? I have a 3 year old who absolutely loves the computer I setup for her and her 4 year old brother.