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Linux Foundation Puts the Cost of Replacing Its Open Source Projects At $5 Billion
chicksdaddy writes: Everybody recognizes that open source software incredibly valuable, by providing a way to streamline the creation of new applications and services. But how valuable, exactly? The Linux Foundation has released a new research paper that tries to put a price tag on the value of the open source projects it comprises, and the price they've come up with is eye-popping: $5 billion. That's how much the Foundation believes it would cost for companies to have to rebuild or develop from scratch the software residing in its collaborative projects.
To arrive at that figure, the Foundation analyzed the code repositories of each one of its projects using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) to estimate the total effort required to create these projects. With 115,013,302 total lines of source code, LF estimated the total amount of effort required to retrace the steps of collaborative development to be 41,192.25 person-years — or 1,356 developers 30 years to recreate the code base present in The Linux Foundation's current collaborative projects listed above.
To arrive at that figure, the Foundation analyzed the code repositories of each one of its projects using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) to estimate the total effort required to create these projects. With 115,013,302 total lines of source code, LF estimated the total amount of effort required to retrace the steps of collaborative development to be 41,192.25 person-years — or 1,356 developers 30 years to recreate the code base present in The Linux Foundation's current collaborative projects listed above.
115,013,302 total lines of source code means nothing if some of it is garbage. How many lines has "He who should not be mentioned" contributed?
They said it would take approximately 30 years for approximately 1300 developers to get there. We know because we have an idea of how things evolved that estimate is actually a bit short. Some of that codebase is about 30 years old, and well more than that many developers have contributed. Things have been done, discarded, redone. The estimate is actually a pretty optimistic one that assumes the developers get it 'mostly' right the first time when actual history has had many many dead ends that caused a total rethink. One would expect the same out of a private endeavor. So there's some balancing out.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Since just one company, Microsoft is earning two billion per year from Android alone. Five billion does seem low.