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.

Comments

Honestly, sounds low ...

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Honestly, sounds low ...

[BradMajors]

Since just one company, Microsoft is earning two billion per year from Android alone. Five billion does seem low.

COCOMO calculation and its drawbacks

[__roo]

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.

On the flip side...

[Junta]

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.