Fedora 9 "worth $10.8bn"

 

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Posted on 24 Oct 2008 at 11:42

A new report claims that building Fedora 9 from scratch would cost around $10.8bn, if a company followed a proprietary development route.

The methodology behind the price tag was based on that established by David Wheeler in 2001, a computer scientist who calculated the cost of a Linux distro by analysing how long it would take to develop each line of code.

On top of that he then added all the usual benefits enjoyed by an employed worker, including wages, benefits and the overheads involved in keeping them happy - including office space.

The report, put together by the Linux Foundation, claims the Fedora 9 distribution contains 204.5 million lines of code in 5,547 application packages. It's a level of work that they estimate would require "60,000 person years" to build again.

It multiplied this figure by the average US developer's annual wages of $75,662, before slapping on an additional charge equivalent to 2.4 times that wage, representing the remaining overheads.

The foundation admits using a US developer's wage skews results: "Of course most software development these days is global, so using a US-only salary number is somewhat specious," the report notes. "One avenue of continued exploration would be to determine a global average salary to use as a baseline for production costs."

Despite this, the foundation claims the ultimate goal of the report is to encourage people to think about the power of the collaborative model, and the value of the individual contribution.

Author: Stuart Turton