Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
They can spend twice that much money and only deliver a tenth of the functionality! That's a win! I think.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
...is like paying airplane manufacturers by weight.
[...]to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars[...]
I'd rather build it in C with a modest compiler.
...a similar estimate for the kernel alone. Or, perhaps a more generalized number which would take into account other distros.
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
I wonder if I can spend some of my karma down at Taco Bell for a burrito?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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.
Perhaps you should consider working on something other than an open source project :)
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 :)
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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 ----
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?
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.
> 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.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"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.
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.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
...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.
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.
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).
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Going by this metric... how much did it cost to develop windows? How much did it actually cost?
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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
In America, homeownership, like college, is a capitalist trap designed to force you into lifelong slavery. Fuck the house, own your life.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
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.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.