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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.
They are presuming that all of their projects are equally valuable. The GCC compiler, for instance, is widely used, and it's disappearance would put a large hole in the software world. Gnu Hurd, on the other hand.... if it disappeared tomorrow, would anyone even notice?
If every corporation which relies on Linux as part of its infrastructure had to buy or build every piece of technology required to replace Linux, I should think on a global scale it would be far more than that.
Because a lot of that effort would be duplicated by multiple companies .. and of course the patent litigation by all of the players who seek to claim they invented some piece of technology which predates them.
I can believe $5 billion in this quite easily.
Of course, I can't read the paper since I need to fill out some fscking form from, and that's not happening.
Pity the Linux Foundation doesn't believe in open information.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For those who don't know, COCOMO is an algorithm that was developed in 1981 by Barry Boehm for estimating the cost of building software (typically in person-hours). The numbers in the article were generated by the basic COCOMO calculation in David Wheeler's free SLOCCount toolset.
One drawback is that SLOCCount uses the basic COCOMO calculation, which is based on historical data gathered by Boehm in 1981. Here's a COCOMO-81 calculator in case you want to play with your own code. Sometimes its estimates are pretty good, but I've sometimes found that applying line counts from my projects in some modern languages (especially functional ones like Scala) throw it off. That could definitely affect the "1,356 developers 30 years" estimate in the article.
Wheeler has a good discussion of COCOMO in SLOCCount if you want to learn more about it.
Building Better Software
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.
Well, sure. America is part of the civilized world... except for the rampant genital mutilation.
Since most companies would either develop proprietary solutions or buy at a substantial markup from an establish publisher, the actual cost to replace all that software would be much, much higher. And if an established organization offers a replacement, it will likely have competitors---which again gives a duplication of effort, even if it is much smaller duplication than proprietary redevelopment of the functionality. This is not addressed at all in the paper.
They do acknowledge that failed or superseded code is not included in their analysis, and there was certainly developer time spent on code that is not a part of the project, either because it was culled or never made the cut to begin with.
Given both of those factors, the $5 billion figure is a very low best-case value. The practical cost of replacement would be monumentally higher once the mundane practicalities come into play.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
The current US "regime" wanted to charge home owners who had taken a mortgage on a house years ago and were making relatively small payments by current rates, the difference between what their house would rent for (if it was more than the mortgage payment) and the mortgage payment as imputed income. Yes, if you were paying $500 a month and the house could rent for $1500, you would have to add $12000 to your annual income in "imputed" income.
This sounds like extreme BS. Care to cite something other than Internet rumor?
The costs also need to consider all the dead ends and bad decisions. How much code was built that was never injected into the system. I suspect that many Linux developers have conjured up some really long and interesting code that they then never submitted. They threw it out and started again.
Then there is the quality of the programmers. The few programmers that I have met who contributed to the Linux codebase were pretty damn kickass. Thus hiring them would not only be expensive but really hard. Most of them wouldn't work for most companies as they know they are the elite of the elite and can pick and choose their surroundings.
Also Linux contributions are often a resume builder. Thus many junior but very very good programmers will do some Linux contributions which then makes them look cool. The reality is that they don't want to work on Linux but want some other job, such as the games industry. This is a double problem. Some company hiring for their 5 billion dollar project would never have hired them because they had crap resumes, and these kids didn't want to work on Linux and thus wouldn't accept a job working for a big boring company building an OS.
Then there is the urgency factor. Many critical tiny bits of Linux were built by people with a specific problem. They didn't have a Linux driver for their 10,000 machines with the L257B Arcnet card. Thus they dove in and modified the driver for the L256A arcnet card just enough to make it work. But where would that kind of bug/feature have been prioritized by a corporation? Plus again the person doing this brought a skillset that was obviously very good for that problem but otherwise might have been a terrible hire for the project.
Then there are the various OS distributions that compete. Not all Linux decisions have been good ones. Thus different distributions follow different paths resulting in winners and losers for various aspects of the system. Over time the winners end up spreading across the distributions and the losers just sort of fade away. Even the classic Gnome vs KDE has resulted in each becoming better. So one must count the costs of developing both Gnome and KDE.
This last one even extends out to other Open Source OS projects such as BSD in that code from that project end up in Linux as well as providing competition.
Then there is the whole build the wrong thing problem. Linux has evolved steadily to meet the demand of its users. But a corporation would build a product that would meet the demands of its marketing department. Thus any corporation building Linux wouldn't build Linux. They would typically build something like Windows or OS/2; Operating systems that were designed to create an ecosystem for selling other crap made by that company and locking their customers in.
So while it is interesting to say such a huge number, I personally think that the number would be far far larger as to put together such a talent pool would probably be a mega project in itself over and above the actual paying of that pool and the other development costs.
This!!! They should recalibrate everything from base 10 to base 16, so that computers save cycles doing BCD conversions
Chick Norris can rewrite the entire kernel in a day . Without a single bug.