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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."
/pinky to mouth ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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
Cathedrals are susceptible to top-down error. You know, the idiot at the top who doesn't know he's an idiot and leads the whole company into ruin over a few decisions. The bazaar of Linux is much more resilient to this at the cost of speed. Also you have not touched on the Freedom aspects (capital F) at all which for most, including myself, is the real reason to use F/OSS.
Shh.
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...
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.
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?
You are nuts.
12 people at 40 hours a week for 9 months is 1123200 minutes. The kernel is about 12 million lines of code. That works out to a line of code every 5 and a half seconds.
Good luck with that.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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.
It's all about the apps and drivers - mostly the apps.
It does not matter how fast, secure, reliable, or inexpensive an OS may be; if it doesn't run the apps, it's not of much use.
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."
40 hours a week? We don't hire slacker programmers here. 80 hours a week minimum means they have 10 whole seconds per line. Plenty of time.
Want to know WHY the Closed source drivers are better?
Closed source driver programmers get the full specs and all details of the hardware including several hardware samples in a test jig setup.
Open source driver programmers get NOTHING. they have to go out and buy the hardware, then buy equipment to reverse engineer it, spend months poking at it trying to figure out how it's supposed to work and then write a driver based on those assumptions.
IT does not have to be that way, it's just that hardware makers really enjoy being raging assholes and intentionally go out of their way to screw with Open Source developers because it's how they get their kicks and gives them something to brag about at parties. There is no legitimate reason for holding back the full hardware interface documentation. NONE.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe they estimated Chuck Norris would do the coding.
If anyone actually funded its development to the tune of a billion dollars, it would be considered a catastrophic failure...
Yeah, right. If Linux is so inadequate that IBM and Cray should be interested in using it, then everybody else should shun it too.
The bread and butter of the open source community are not as high functioning as Linus et. al. A lot of software gets written because it's sexy to write rather than because it's needed. Windows and Mac OS X each have a single window manager and maybe two filesystems; Linux has hundreds of one and dozens of the other because they're sexy and fun to write. We have a half dozen version control systems where MS and Apple each maybe use one or two at most internally. Yet we have few working video drivers. This is a clear benefit of having paid programmers. They write fewer developer tools and spend more time improving existing user-facing stuff, because if they don't, they get fired.
Furthermore, a lot of green programmers start OSS projects to become better at programming. Very little commercial software is written entirely by new programmers. This is why it's hard to stay up-to-date in the Ruby community. A lot of the code is written by new Ruby programmers enamored with language features, and then it has to be thrown away and rewritten differently in the face of real-world demands. There's also more glory in starting projects with promise than in carrying through and maintaining older projects. Few people use FVWM2 even though it's stable, fast and highly configurable. Most Linux users today are probably using Metacity or KWM instead.
Most OSS projects reach a certain level of maturity, get stale and get abandoned, leading to this churn. That doesn't happen in the commercial world because code is perceived as having a dollar value. Sometimes, maybe even frequently, this belief is wrong or overestimated, but it does mean that commercial software is often older than OSS, which (IMO) compensates somewhat for the lack of eyeballs finding bugs. Age finds bugs too.
It's hard for me to imagine the world's most highly performing programmers not contributing to open source, but it's just as silly to expect that they aren't outnumbered by average programmers who don't have time to contribute, or that a dozen average programmers can't produce solid code. In many cases I find they produce simpler, more maintainable code because they're less inclined to the theatrics which are the chief form of compensation for OSS developers.
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.
That's assuming that a replacement would be 12m lines of code. I recently rewrote a few classes for an open source project that I contribute to and replaced 5,000 lines of code with 500 (which did more, ran faster, and fixed some bugs along the way). Just because the current implementation is 12m lines, doesn't mean that the correct implementation is 12m lines. From the Linux kernel code that I've read, 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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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
Yea, I wish we could get mother nature to stop that evolution crap. It is a well proven failed model for building quality systems.
Living in Chile
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.
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
On the desktop, for the vast majority of users? Yes, precisely. Some of us would like that to change, but you really need to see things for what they are now if you want to make change happen.