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The Billion Dollar Kernel
jesgar writes "The Linux kernel would cost more than one billion EUR (about 1.4 billion USD) to develop in the European Union. This is the estimate made by researchers from the University of Oviedo (PPT), whereby the value annually added to this product was about 100 million EUR between 2005 and 2007 and 225 million EUR in 2008. The estimated 2008 result is comparable to 4% and 12% of Microsoft's and Google's R&D expenses on whole company products. Cost model 'Intermediate COCOMO81' is used according to parametric estimations by David Wheeler. An average annual base salary for a developer of 31,040 EUR was estimated from the EUROSTAT. Previously, similar works had been done by several authors estimating Red Hat, Debian, and Fedora distributions. The cost estimation is not of itself important, but it is an important means to an end: that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition that would set it as an alternative to decision-makers. Ideally, legal and regulatory frameworks must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare."
Just think how many cans of Mountain Dew we could have bought with that.
/pinky to mouth ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
And yet no one would use it on the desktop.
That 1 billion would soon seem like chicken feed!
Given a dozen developers and a hard spec, Linux could be developed in 8 to 9 months.
Now, the beauty of OSS is that are no hard specs, so that could indefinitely extend the development time, I suppose.
But to say that the OS couldn't be developed for under a million bucks is pretty fucking stupid. Maybe if they got their tongues off of Linus's dick for a minute or two they could refer to actual development schedules rather than make-believe schedules based on projects done by idiot students.
It would be cool if companies involved in open-source development would not have to pay taxes for related activities.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Something based on lines of code like COCOMO is probably not a good estimate for a kernel. Kernel debugging is harder for one. Many of the drivers required some level of reverse engineering as well.
I'd say every "Kernel line of code" is probably worth 10 lines of code in userspace, if not more.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
What you call your 'American perspective', I call brainwashing
...if developed off-shore
Seems like spending 2 billion on a twice-as-good kernel would be a good investment.
...but in order to make comparisons with Google, Microsoft or Apple, you have to add many, many lines of code. If you start to include the OSS equivalent of the standard installation of windows XP + MSOffice + Visual Studio: Linux + GNU + Firefox + GNOME/KDE + various drivers + open office + Eclipse ... you get much much more code. I think that more man-hours have been invested in the regular Ubuntu install than in the premium XP install.
But please, don't use dollars as a metric for that. As soon as any sum reaches more than one billion, a politician will try to tax it.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Waiste of money when there is FreeBSD
-paul
Wait a minute...Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes? Am I allowed to charge the $50 an hour I think I'm worth? I'm sure this has been asked before, but it's the first I've ever actually thought about it...
Yet it's been around nearly 20 years, it's given away free, it has advocates that make the mac fanboys look calm and reasonable, and it still hasn't cracked the 3% mark in desktop market. If anyone actually funded its development to the tune of a billion dollars, it would be considered a catastrophic failure on par with Enron, Duke Nukem Forever and pets.com.
Quote 'The cost estimation [implies] that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition...." I don't think that is how the US system works, which is by market recognition. It doesn't matter how hard you work or how much money you put into it; what matters is if people buy it. That assumes, somewhat naively, that people are "rational economic actors" and that companies like MS and GOOgLE don't have massive FUD machines (aka marketing)
Ideally, legal and regulatory framework must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Since the code has been released as open source, it isn't really an asset of the company that wrote it anymore than it is to anyone else who uses it. It isn't something that could be liquidated to pay off debts, and allowing them to specify it as an asset on their balance sheets seems like just another way to distort the books and confuse investors. I don't see any good coming out of that.
Secondly, I don't see the point in letting them receive tax deductions for their contributions. They made these contributions because it was in their best interest to do so regardless of the tax status. And while it is nice that their contributions help the community as a whole, they themselves are helped by contributions that others have made. If they weren't taxed on the later, why should they get a deduction for the former? Open source is already provides economic and social benefits to those that participate in it's development - government wealth distribution is not needed in a system that already does so inherently.
Finally, even if I did agree with these goals, I don't see how having an estimate of the cost of the kernel as a whole would help - what matters are the specific contributions of the company and there are better ways to figure that.
An average developer won't be able to write the Linux kernel.
Its an interesting estimate, but I don't buy the argument for favorable tax treatment for "social welfare." For many companies, open source is one side of a many-sided business model: i.e., they're making their money somewhere else. Giving special tax treatment for such a thing would be similar to giving Adobe special tax treatment for Adobe Reader, or AT&T for giving away free cell phone. The freebie is a necessary for them to build a profitable market elsewhere.
What would be lovely is if I could get tax credits for committing to open products that further help mankind in my spare time!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Did they factor in two-hour lunch breaks and the afternoon nap? I guess this calcultion was something to keep amused with as the day goes by.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You've put billions of dollars of effort into something, and you didn't even get PAID for it.
Hahahahhhahahahahhahaa!
31,000 euro for a _kernel_ developer?? Probably closer to 3 times that. I know it's an average, but do you really think the maintainer of a memory system, or the scsi stack, etc are worth less than 6 figures?
Vitriol aside, "Social Welfare" can mean anything, like a organization (say, a Church) in a community providing a non-trivial benefit to said community, while operating as a nonprofit. To put it tactfully, you need your "American Perspective" checked. It improves the welfare of the society (albeit in a somewhat hard to measure way). Saying that society as a whole (outside the open source community) has not benefited from Open Source (to which it pays no material compensation for) is ludicrous, therefore donations to open source should be treated just as any other donation to a nonprofit group.
People who write windows drivers are usually given specs for the hardware.
Given the additional difficulty of reverse engineering, it's a miracle open source drivers work at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Two words: tax scam
There is enough of tax scams going around already. If you chose to donate your time for charity, that is your choice. You see what happens is layers would start to "donate" their time at $3000/h and soon they end up donating more than their earnings. So we are back to step 1, tax scam.
The bottom line is people either write Linux code because it is their job or they like to write Linux code. It's like anyone else. I either look at Mars and Jupiter because I'm a professional astronomer, or because I like it and spend thousands of dollars a year on equipment. In the latter case, my work is free because I like that work.
So yeah, it would be great to live in a Star Trek world too, where you do what you like and there is no notion of money as there is today. But until then, we have to settle for today's crappy world where you work to live and then work for free some more on stuff you like to work.
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Bank executives are payed 10s of millions of dollars per year for their amazing contributions to society. Hedge fund managers pull in hundreds of millions of dollars for all they do to make the world a better place. Considering Linus's work benefits society more than anything any of these asshats have ever done by a mile, he alone should be pulling a 10 figure salary - so I think these estimates are way too small.
No, what you'd get for a billion Euros is that many lines of code. No idea if the code would be any good. But usually when managers are fixated on the LOC, you get lots of LOC, not necessarily GOOD or FAST code. Just lots of it. Been there, seen it, upchucked, many times.
Is open source labor as cost efficient as hiring a real programmer?
Wait, are you saying that Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Cohen and Bram Moolenaar are not real programmers?
Or... well, exactly what do you mean by "open source labor"? As I understand it, a copyright license can be open source, as can software* released under an open source license. But I don't know how to extend that to labour---do you mean the labour that goes into producing open source software? If I look at a work process, how do I tell whether it qualifies as "open source" by your definition?
(* and music, movies, books, and other copyrightable stuff)
12 dollars 32 cents if it had been outsourced to India...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I bet, even when you offer 1.4 mrd USD (aka "billion USD" in US) to commercial delelopers and it would take 20 years, they would not manage to write something like Linux. It would rather be a concept on paper or on powerpoint slides. But... they would take the money anyway.
Come on. This was an artfully crafted troll. Comparing open source to YouTube crap videos, without ever making a direct comparison, yet implying that most open source is like most crap videos: textbook propaganda. Then we have the 'real programmers' line, again implying that open source programmers are not real programmers, without ever stating it directly. Finally, there's the 'twenty experts' line, again, implying that no open source programmers are experts.
Seriously, people pay good money to learn how to write propaganda of that quality. And people who are that good at writing propaganda get paid very, very well. I wonder who 'useful wheat' is working for?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
An average annual base salary for a developer of 31,040 EUR
What kind of silly number is that? I am 100% sure there is no single person who earns that little... is there?
Definitey not with all the taxes included. That would result in 2299 EUR a month (plus 1.5 months of holiday and christmas bonus.)
Or about 1250 EUR net money on your bank account. Or just below 8 EUR (net) an hour.
As a programmer?? Just... Silly.
That wouldn’t leave you with much, after apartment, food, phone/internet and basic clothing & co. With a bit bad luck (in a big city), you couldn’t even pay for a car. (= expensive fuel)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yeah, like monkeys need pants. Haven't we had enough of you-hide-it-we-find-it accounting? The cost of this work should be realized when the funds are spent, not in some theoretical future when the benefits of FOSS may come back to the roost. Why? Because the primary benefit of FOSS is the avoidance of those costs in the future. To handle it otherwise would be double counting the benefit.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
The last that I've heard is that Spain faces some fiscal difficulties, they need to raise some revenue.
Though the study only considers the kernel, a starting point has been established. Downloading an entire operating system for free (other than ISP charges) denies the state the revenue from sales/VAT tax that would have been paid on shrink-wrapped product. The downloader receives benefit from the download similar to the benefit received by someone who purchased the shrink-wrap product. Should the downloader be taxed similarly to the tax-paying purchaser?
Now that a value is placed on something that is free, it is ready to be taxed like any other product on the market. What I wonder is, did U of O undertake the study at the behest of the government.
Is that street- or dealer-value ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
where is your paycheck? Hmmmmm?
My paycheck is in the code. For example, I wrote the Objective-C code generation stuff in clang for the GNU Objective-C runtime. Apple employees wrote most of the parsing logic. I get a full-featured Objective-C 2 compiler that I can use on non-Apple platforms. Apple gets some bugs fixed for free. Both of us get out more than we put in.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think you missed the point. In theory, "social Welfare" is meant to mean what you say, but what I think you missed was who and when the term "social welfare" is used to describe something, and bmajik was right on. "Social" is the most general, sneaky, backhanded way to describe everybody and nobody at the same time; any argument that certain people won't be helped means they meant someone else, and any accusation of harm is refuted with "necessity".
It is like the term "social justice": It COULD mean freeing individuals from the tyranny of the mob, entrusting people to be the best judges of how they should live their own lives, manage their own health, or do with with their own justly acquired property as they see fit... but I don't think anybody that has ever meant that when they use the term "social justice". Just like social welfare, social justice is generally "let me tell you a thing or two about fair!" at gun point. I'm not saying their wrong, I just sometimes take issue with the way it is being said.
I don't think an average developer salary is the accurate number to use in this estimate. The developers working on the kernel are probably anything but average.
Can someone decode this for me?
"Donation to Social Welfare" means that an action benefits society as a whole. In this case the author is saying that companies that improve the kernel are doing something that benefits others, and perhaps governments should set up incentives to encourage this good behavior. A tax break ("equitable tax treatment") is given as an example.
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
Your in-built translation seems to be broken by your ideology. The fact that you believe something should not keep you from being able to read, even if you disagree with the author. Please don't insult Americans by pretending that this failure of your intellect inflicts all of us.
Can someone decode this for me?
Do they want to tax companies that sponsor F/OSS development? Or subsidize them? Or do they want the flexibility to do both, and will change their mind depending on which company and which year we're talking about?
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
In the US there are several very deeply entrenched political biases against the responsibility of the individual to society... so yes your background influences how you are taking both the words "social" and "welfare".
Try reading it this way instead;
"Developing commons-based software contribute towards improving the standard of living in a very real way. Most tax entities provide for tax deductions of goods and services to charitable organizations. If FOSS development was given the same tax-reducing benefit that donations to religious and political organizations have, this would greatly foster (and to an extent subsidize) corporate interest in creating, contributing, and releasing commons-based software."
If such development contributions can become "intangible assets" (things that have value but not a price tag), then they can be "donated" to a charitable non-profit. The non-profit then assesses a value for the donation, and this amount now becomes tax deductible to the company.
Since this wasn't clear I'm just guessing that "intangible assets", "equitable tax treatment", and "donation" are the real things that you didn't understand... and "social welfare" was just the political trigger that you focused on.
If you genuinely want to learn the complexity of taxes, capitalism, freedom, and responsibility; I'd recommend you change where you get your news from.
p.s. As a personal recommendation; if you're able to disarm your "political triggers" try NPR instead of the usual network ratings whores. You'll learn a lot rather than be told a lot.
"Social Welfare" can mean anything
Yes, but it in the US it only means "commie-style income distribution". It's a perfect example of reversed (corporate) doublespeak: By systematically equating social welfare with communism, the US government has succesfully tainted even the slightest notion of progressive tax systems (i.e. the largest shoulders carry the largest burden). The GP is a perfect example of that (but at least he is aware of it). It has come to the point where any non-uniform tax reform will be resisted by all layers of the population, regardless of whether they would benefit from it or not.
At least that's what it looks like from my non-American perspective...
So what, then? We make all US citizens read, memorize, and be quizzed daily on the "Tragedy of the Commons" and the "Story of Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, And Nobody"? (google it.)
Ok, so you read it as, the EU should setup tax incentives for companies to release code under F/OSS license, as F/OSS software benefits "society".
It's an interesting point of view for a few reasons. While on its face, I'd tend to agree that "F/OSS is good for the world", it's an interesting thing to actually measure.
One way to naively consider the point is to say that fewer than 5% of computer users are direct benefectors of the linux kernel and all linux / GNU distributions combined, as in, linux has had little penetration into the desktop thus far. Is a subsidy that benefits 5% of computer users appropriate for a government body to take on? Perhaps.
Widening the scope a bit, you might say that most computer users end up _communicating_ with a web server running F/OSS software [i.e. LAMP]. This is a bit spurious, however. In this case, the providers in question, who are often for-profit entities, are benefitting from F/OSS software. A person navigating to a website doesn't often know what software they are communicating with, much less its license, and much less drive financial or intangible benefit from same.
Services like Ebay and Hotmail have wavered between various F/OSS and commercially licensed systems over time, and their customer experience, impact, and costs have remained the same.
So if you want to argue that Apache has been a transformational peice of F/OSS software and has made society better, I might be inclined to agree, but I'd clarify that it has primarily made it cheaper for _corporations_ to deploy IT infrastructure. They may or may not pass on any such cost savings to the world at large.
In terms of what would do the most "good for society", and where government should either spend money it's taken (or collect less of it if certain conditions are met), would you argue for or against the EU paying extra money to Microsoft [or some 3rd party] for EU-specific security patches to Microsoft software. Naturally the EU would then freely distribute these fixes to its member nations and citizens.
Releasing software under an F/OSS license certainly benefits some people. I think there is a defensible argument that releasing features or security fixes for popular commercial software benefits many, many more people. How would one justify the former without making an even stronger argument for the latter?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I am a little concerned when something done with the power of government can "mean anything". That's a recipie for problems. There are actually a number of people in the US that would argue that Churches and other religiously affiliated entities should stop receiving preferential tax treatment because the benefits are conditional and are distributed "unfairly".
I think this is actually the case with all things done in the name of "social welare". Some individuals receive benefits and others do not, and the distribution mechanism is always conditional to some extent.
I don't think it is ludicrous to question the benefits to "Society" afforded by F/OSS. I tried to do it in a quasi-numeric method in a different response on this thread. I agree with the _sentiment_ that the world is better off with F/OSS than without it. However, what governments should be funding in the name of "benefit to all" is a different matter, and requires discussion rather than mere sentiment or claims of self-evident truth.
The article is about the attempt to quantify the the _value_ of one F/OSS project, probably as the first step of this political endeavour.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Your in-built translation apparatus is simply too simple. "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence" is HOW "Social Welfare" is frequently accomplished. It isn't the Social Welfare itself. While this does happen, it isn't the only way to give to Social Welfare. The article is suggesting that Linux developers have already willingly donated to Social Welfare, so should get the benefits that are usually reserved for those that have been victims of "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence".
I suspect that there is a lot of redundant and duplicated code in the kernel. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could implement it with a cleaner design in closer to 1m lines of code.
You'd be wrong. There's actually relatively little duplicated code in the kernel, mostly due to the fact that it's constantly being refactored. The vast majority of kernel code is drivers and arch-specific stuff.
some ones trying to get some eu pork(tax breaks) for OS projects
Well, gee ... if Linux went away, there'd still
be unix ... both of them "free" (you get what you
pay for).
If you paid 20 experts to write code for a year, and didn't allow anyone other than those experts to see it, would their output be better than the same 20 experts writing code for the same year but allowing anyone in the world to see it?
Few people are writing open-source software out of the kindness of their hearts. It's either because they are being paid specifically to do so, or because they're being paid to do something else and they can get their job done better by submitting a patch to an existing codebase than they could by writing something from scratch.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I understand where you are coming from, but your notion of 'support by the government' in terms of tax breaks on contributions basically breaks down to the government saying "if you are willing to give money to a properly registered nonprofit group, so are we (to the tune of 15% or whatever your bracket is)." By "mean anything" in this case, it means "only what a person willing to give their income for no tangible return wants it to mean."
What more could you expect in terms of the government democratically supporting social programs? They are letting the *people* decide where the money goes. Do you think we would be better off by having the federal government say that they alone will decide which social programs will be supported with tax dollars (putting aside for a moment the argument you are about to make that no social programs are to be supported with tax dollars... it's not going to happen.)?
Yes, it grew out of Bell Labs v7 Unix, but the Berkeley Unix work was done at a public university.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It did start out as a student's project, after all.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Reading has to do with the recognition of word boundaries and matching ordred sequences of letters to plausible patterns.
Comprehension is different: understanding what the author was attempting to communicate to you.
The original article used several words that have socio-politically ambiguous meanings. You have used "social welfare" to mean two different things in two consecutive sentences in your dismissive and condescending response. I beleive you've unintentionally highlighted part of the problem.
I was asking for feedback regarding my parsing of what the author meant. Specifically, I recognized a number of weasel-words and thus needed to try and translate them to something with actual meaning.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Back in the mumblety-80s, standard Bell Labs* Unix licenses came in binary and source versions. Binaries were cheap, source more expensive, universities got discounts so it was nearly free to them. At one point the US Government wanted a license that would give them unlimited rights to the code, because that was what they got for software that they'd paid to have develop, and their contracting bureaucrats insisted strenuously that they wanted that option for Unix as well. The Bell Labs Obnoxious Licensing Lawyers thought about it for a while, decided ok, and gave them a price - One Billion Dollars. The government bureaucrats said "ok, thanks", checked the box on their forms saying it was available, didn't actually order it :-)
* Actually, depending on the year, it might have been Bell Labs, or Western Electric, or various parts of AT the bureaucracy you ordered Unix from changed over the years.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This site is operated by the Linux Kernel Organization, Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation, with support from the following sponsors.
How much would it cost if it were developed for a government contract?!
[T]he US government has succesfully tainted even the slightest notion of progressive tax systems (i.e. the largest shoulders carry the largest burden).
Except that in the US, the largest shoulders do carry the largest burden. The bottom 40% of tax payers have an effective income tax rate of between -2.3% and 0.3%. The top 20% earned slightly over half of the income, and paid over 80% of income taxes.
What exactly was your point?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States
Why shouldn't the goverment simply do what Google SoC does. Or they could spent 80 million to do a "winter of code" in their name. In government terms that is peanuts but it would make a huge difference to internet development and raise international attention.
Direct funding, not tax incentives. In fact the EU funds a lot of development, just that it is not open source.
A couple of years ago I went to a seminar by HMRC (Revenue and Customs) on R&D Tax Credits here in the UK. I stood up and asked the speaker how Open Source is seen by HMRC in terms of R&D tax credits. I explained to them that the software we help develop (Plone) is used by numerous public sector organisations in the UK. One of the key criteria for R&D Tax Credits is that you need to own the IP of whatever it is you are developing. I explained to them that our entire business model was based upon us *not* owning the IP of the software we are helping to develop.
I was laughed at. Seriously. The speaker and a good portion of the audience laughed at my ridiculous idea of my business not owning the IP of the software I was developing.
The Plone Foundation recently valued Plone using COCOMO at US$3 million.
-Matt
Note our great Apollo space program example was around 1-2 billion in today's dollars for software development... and that got us to the moon, new technologies, and beyond. BTW...
With that perspective, $1 billion dollars to run a $299 netbook to check email, surf the web securely, and copy photo files? On a lousy (gnome/KDE) window manager (remember "The Year of the Linux Desktop"?)...
Are we calling this "mission accomplished"? I beg to differ.
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where is your paycheck? Hmmmmm?
Plenty of open-source developers out there coding for companies that have at least some commercial interests. And I'm not talking small companies per say, I'm talking Google, Sun and Intel, for example.
Me, I just like sharing to the world what I've made so others can potentially improve it. OSS is kind of like a charity if you think about it.
I am not devoid of humor.
Yes, the income tax in the US has been setup perfectly so that it can still be defended. Have you also looked at those numbers after SSI has been incorporated? My comment was in relation to "Social Welfare", after all. Go ahead and look, it's on the same page, just above "Payroll Taxes".
I'm not interested in the raw numbers in that table, but in the effects of Social Security on the tax distribution. As you can see, after incorporating SSI, there is nothing left of your "over 80%", nor of the "-2.3%" for the lowest incomes. To put it in simple terms:
The Social Security constructs in the US give a 20% tax bonus to the top-earning 20%, and a tax burden of roughly 5% on everyone else.
As an aside, it's amazing to me that the top 0.1% of the population earns 10% of the country's income; but I don't have numbers to compare that to Europe.
Also, how come there is a income-dependent limit to deductions? Like the article says, a person with an 200k$/y income gets to deduct 6 times more expenditures than someone with a 40k$/y income.