The Linux Founation has released its first ever report estimatng the value of its Collaborative Projects. In values the development costs of the Collaborative Projects at $5bn.
These projects are independently funded software projects that are contributed to buy over 500 companies, and thousands of developers.
Amanda McPherson, vice president of developer programs and CMO at Linux Foundation, who co-authored the report, said: "As the model for building the world’s most important technologies have evolved from the past’s build vs. buy dichotomy, it is important to understand the economic value of this development model. We hope our new paper can help contribute to that understanding."
The report, which was based on a study from David A. Wheeler that put a value on Linux development in 2008, found that 115,013,302 lines of source code are press in Linux Foundation’s Collaborative projects.
This is the equates to 41,192.25 person years of effort, meaning it would take 1,3656 developers 30 years to recreate the code bases.
