We really can’t set the price for “Precious” things in life. Can we?

Have you ever thought how much it might have cost Gates to build linux in his M$ factory?

The total development cost represented in a typical Linux distribution was $1.2 billion. We’ve used his tools and method to update these findings. Using the same tools, we estimate that it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars, with today’s software development costs. Additionally, it would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone

It’s from one of the report written by Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffit and Ron Hale-Evans based on an update of a 2002 study done by David A. Wheeler. Linux Foundation Publishes this report as Study Estimating the Value of Linux. New report finds the value of developing a Linux distribution to be worth $10.8 billion. The report, titled “Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution,” is available today.

Source Code and Estimated Cost Results

Finally, given all the assumptions shown previously, the SLOC and estimated production values for Fedora 9 are as follows.

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) 204,500,946
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))		 59389.53 (712674.36)
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))		 24.64 (295.68)
Total Estimated Cost to Develop
(average salary = $75,662.08/year, overhead = 2.40).		 $10,784,484,309