The Linux Foundation estimates that it would have cost a conventional company $10.8 billion to develop the latest version of Fedora. Developing the kernel alone would cost $1.4 billion.
The Linux Foundation used the same method used in a 2002 study for this estimate. At that time, Red Hat Linux 7.1’s development costs, based on the cost per line of code, were estimated at $1.2 billion.
The new research took into account that version 9 of Fedora has 204,500,946 lines of code and that the average annual salary of a US programmer is $75,662. This brings the foundation to a total amount of USD 10,784,484,309 for the development of Fedora 9. The researchers to estimate that developing the kernel cost $1,372,340,206.
“More than 1,000 developers from at least 100 different companies contribute to every kernel release. More than 3,200 developers from 200 companies have contributed to the kernel in the last two years alone,” the Linux Foundation said, noting that the kernel is only a small part of a Linux distribution, and thousands more individual developers have contributed to the other components of the distro.
The question of how much Linux is really worth cannot be answered accurately, admits the Linux Foundation. “The enormous costs borne by the community for Linux development is a testament to the importance of distributions in today’s computing world,” the researchers said. According to them, it is exceptional that a single company – Microsoft – can afford the enormous cost, and they expect that competition from collaborative projects like Linux will eventually make the necessary monopoly unsustainable.