Fedora 9 worth 10.8 billion dollars !

24 Oct, 2008 fedora, linux

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A whitepaper released by the linux foundation estimating the cost of making a linux distribution has really surprised me.They say it would take $1.4 billion to develop the linux kernel alone and the cost building Fedora 9 from scratch using the latest development tools would be around 10.8 billion dollars!.The report quotes

Over 1,000 developers, from at least 100 different companies, contribute to every kernel release. In the past two years alone, over 3,200 developers from 200 companies have contributed to the kernel.2 It’s important to note that the kernel is just one small piece of a Linux distribution. A distribution is actually made up of multiple components including the kernel, the GNOME and KDE desktop environments, the GNU components, the X window system, and many more. The total of individual developers contributing to these projects surely numbers in the thousands.

Another astonishing fact that the report threw light on is the number of lines of code Fedora has :- 204,500,946 ! .I guess Fedora has come a long way since those Red Hat 9 days where mounting a ntfs drive was such a herculean task.And now Fedora 9 where everything is easy and classy with kde 4 and latest gnome version,one could never have imagined at that point that linux would come such a long way and still there is a lot more to come.In the age of corporate monopoly Linux proves that a product doesn’t necessarily have to be money driven but a community driven effort and can also make a masterpiece.The economic recession in the U.S and subesquently the world has affected many big companies which also includes Microsoft and Apple but linux is almost unaffected by that.All community-driven projects are almost perfectly immune of financial disasters whereas it doesn’t take much time for a big company to go bankrupt.Its not just software where a community driven effort(open source) can make milestones,but other fields too have many things to learn from linux.The total worth of Linux shows us that if every softwares project goes open source we can always have softwares which are independent of the nerve-wrecking tickers of the stock market.In the future we may see a lot other financial problems also maybe some mega virus or something that’s where linux will win -The Long Run.Microsoft may take a million shortcuts and a billion dollars to reach the top but again its the long run that counts.The higher one goes the greater the risk to fall.Remember the day Apple was in a bad financial state and had to make a pact with Microsoft?.That has never happened to linux and will never happen too.I guess Microsoft must be really ashamed of itself for putting in so much money and making such stupid software whereas Linux a zero capital project is worth so much.Data and Stats Source :http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php

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