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Fedora 9 Would Cost $10.8B To Build From Scratch

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that's-a-lot-of-hats dept.

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.'"

7 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Paying programmers by lines of code... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...is like paying airplane manufacturers by weight.

  2. Only $427.33 on eLance by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 :)

  3. Lines =! quality =! true cost by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  4. But it wouldn't by 91degrees · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:But it wouldn't by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  5. Re:Imagine... by Siberwulf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. In all seriousness by JDub87 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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