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."

Comments

Re:One BILLIOIN DOLLARS

[Pojut]

"Frikkin' kernals with frikkin' lazer beams in their frikkin' code!"

-The truth behind Linux's security

I'm not sure COCOMO is a good measure

[GigsVT]

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.

Re:I'm not sure COCOMO is a good measure

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I'd say every "Kernel line of code" is probably worth 10 lines of code in userspace, if not more.

Why? Because you think there's some fundamental difference between low level and high level code?

Papayas don't need to be ripe to be useful. Green papayas can be pickled and be just as tasty as sweet ripe ones. The only differentiation is the time of picking.

Why would you give bonus points to the early pickers just because you don't understand the pickling process?

Re:I'm not sure COCOMO is a good measure

[Anonymous Coward]

Papayas don't need to be ripe to be useful. Green papayas can be pickled and be just as tasty as sweet ripe ones. The only differentiation is the time of picking.

What in the fuck are you talking about.

Re:I'm not sure COCOMO is a good measure

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Ah, you're clearly a user-space developer.

I wish I had some shiny pieces of glass to distract you.

Ramifications

[Verdatum]

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...

Re:Ramifications

[dylan_-]

Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes?

You'd need to check local laws, but I doubt it: charitable donations are usually only deductable to a registered charity. Mind you, if your local LUG is a registered charity, then you probably could...

Re:Seems a bit high

[characterZer0]

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.

One hand tied behind your back

[Hognoxious]

I don't know. However, if I had to guess I would say no. If you look at the state of 3d video drivers, and gimp, the closed source version is typically better. Windows drivers are almost always better for video cards.

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.

Of course he did

[spun]

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?

Re:Seems a bit high

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:So, FLOSS developers;

[TheRaven64]

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.