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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.
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.
...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...
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.
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.
O dammit posting anonymously still undoes one's moderations XD
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."
Maybe they estimated Chuck Norris would do the coding.
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.
Now who gets the last laugh!
The other mods who modded you Troll?
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
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
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 basis for copyright is that the public wishes to increase the amount of work in the public domain. Copyright is a deal between creators and public whereby the public believes that there will be more works generated (and end up public domain) by giving a temporary monopoly to creators. The key in the deal, however, is not to reward the creator, but to generate works for the public domain.*
I would suggest, therefore, that giving (tax) incentives for open source software is in line with this policy. People who contribute to open source are giving up their monopoly rights and their work is available immediately for remixing into new works**. Since time is money I would suggest that anyone who is willing to give up their monopoly period should be rewarded.
This isn't a unique concept: Corporations get all kinds of special and additional tax deductions for various activities such as R&D. We do this with the same line of reasoning: we want more R&D, so we provide an incentive so we can reap the rewards.
Lastly, it should be pointed out that the level of incentive (how rich is this program) should be inversely proportional to the duration of copyright. In other words if copyright lasts longer I've given up more by immediately making it available for remixing and should therefore get a greater incentive. If copyright is short than I haven't given up much and should require less incentive.
* perpetual copyright extension has killed this, but that is another topic.
** Yes, it's not public domain, but they no longer have a monopoly on the distribution of the work.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
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
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