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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."
more like ass-to-mouth, based on the linux devs I've met.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That is because Linux sucks. This isn't a troll, it's the honest, hair tearing truth after I just fucked around with trying to get Linux running on one of my computers. Where to begin?
1) First, the installation disc refused to boot. Just crashes immediately after loading.
2) Worked around that to boot a basic ISO image directly off of the internal hard drive using Unetbootin. Installation gives numerous errors and I must force the installation to continue.
3) After hours of waiting for the install to finish, it finally does so and my computer starts making a beeping sound as if a key were held down.
4) Checked keys to make sure none of them were stuck. None were, therefore it is a bug in Linux.
5) After booting to the desktop for the first time, I get hundreds of instances of some screenshot utility that thinks some hotkey is continuously being pressed when none are.
6) Noticing that both KDE and Gnome are extremely sluggish, I logout and choose FluxBox as the window manager.
7) Bad move. FluxBox is even more slow and causes my hard drive to grind constantly. I have to wait several minutes just for my logout click to be registered.
8) Screen flickers and shows multiple fullscreen commandline prompts that just cycle on their own.
9) FluxBox desktop comes back up without any input and without presenting login screen even though I chose to logout. Hard disk grinding excessively still. After about 2 minutes, screen goes blank, then computer locks itself and presents a password prompt despite not enough time elapsing for screensaver to kick in.
10) Enter correct password, but password prompt refuses it and claims it's not valid. No option to logout or shutdown accessible at all, so forced to power off PC.
11) PC powers back on and the filesystem check goes haywire about some file fragmentation. Takes 5 minutes to scan and another 3 minutes to present a login screen.
12) Choose Gnome and login. Another 2 minutes of hard drive grind before the desktop is fully usable.
13) Screenshot dialog starts popping up multiple times again. I go to keyboard preferences and remove the hotkeys connected to taking screenshots.
14) A couple of minutes later out of the blue, screenshot dialog starts popping up numerous times again even though I removed all hotkey references to it.
15) Fuck this. I've formatted the drive and put XP back on there.
As I said, this is not a troll. I just spent a full day trying to get this working. At best the system comes up, grinds the hard drive a lot, causes the system to always be in full power mode, numerous random screenshot dialog popups and very poor performance. At worst it locks itself and refuses my completely valid password for no reason.
When I went to reinstall XP it was easy as pie. The installation took one hour, everything worked fine on the first shot and performance levels are where they should be.
I wish I had a shiny piece of glass to distract the stupid linsux developers. A bunch of monkeys pounding randomly on keyboards would produce cleaner more reliable code than Linus and his herd of morons
From a former linsux user who got tired of kernel panics with reliable hardware in mission critical (read people's lives at stake) applications