Saying it's an update of this article. In case you don't like reading URLs, the newer blog post says Debian "wheezy" is worth $19 billion.
I consider this a simplistic analysis, because a closed-source Linux with a straightforward monetary pricetag would be worth a lot less in practice, since it would cease to be the de-facto OS for pretty much all new hardware products. Like BSD before it, which got ported to most workstations because it was freely available, Linux derives a good deal of its value from the fact you can port it to anything that doesn't run away quickly enough without having to pay money or even negotiate to license it from anyone.
Also, this pinged a few neurons deep in my memory, so I found what it made me remember. Back in 2004, some random named Jeff V. Merkey tried to buy a special license to the then-current kernel for $50,000.00:
> Also, this pinged a few neurons deep in my memory, so I found what it made me remember. Back in 2004, some random named Jeff V. Merkey tried to buy a special license to the then-current kernel for $50,000.00:
> In response, Molnar did some quick sloccount math and estimated the kernel as being worth $175,974,824 at that time.
Absolutely.
Just to clarify: Molnar first did the quick sloccount math and estimated $176 million USD. However, Molnar used the estimation values appropriate for an application.
But in fact, operating systems kernels are known to be more difficult to develop than typical applications. So I used the same approach but refined it to use parameters appropriate for a kernel. The article https://dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html is really a response to Molnar's work; he did a rough estimate, I did a slightly-more-refined estimate. Those additional tweaks resulted in a higher redevelopment cost of $612 million (USD). Which gave the $50,000 offer an even bigger contrast.
The real point was that, even if it would have been possible accept $50K, it was absurdly low. You could argue about the estimate for a factor of 2, or 10, or even 100, and it still wouldn't change anything.
> I consider this a simplistic analysis, because a closed-source Linux with a straightforward monetary pricetag would be worth a lot less in practice, since it would cease to be the de-facto OS for pretty much all new hardware products.
It's necessarily an estimate, of course. The best way to get effort figures would be to record every minute used for development, and the best way to get cost figures would be to re-develop from scratch. That wasn't practical, so using a widely-accepted estimation system seemed like a reasonable approach.
It's true that this analysis doesn't tell you the purchase price. However, I wasn't trying to estimate the purchase price. I was trying to estimate the cost to develop the software, if it had been developed using traditional closed source practices. If Linux had been developed by a for-profit organization to make a profit, the organization would have planned on charging more that that (in aggregate among all its users), since otherwise they'd be knowingly developing the software at a loss. That doesn't mean that the company actually could have charged this, as it often happens that products don't make a profit, but that's different from intent. And this is all different from value. If a product has value to you that's more than it costs to get, then economically you should consider getting it.
No matter what, these time and money figures can only be rough estimates. However, I think they were useful, because they destroyed a false assumption many had at the time.
In the 1980s and 1990s many people presumed that large-scale systems could NOT be developed as open source software. People did sometimes share software, but it was widely assumed that this could only be successful for small programs. The term "open source software" didn't even exist until 1998. The term "free software" was coined in the early 1980s, so that definitely was a discussion point. However, many people didn't think you could build larger systems with software licensed that way.
Bill Gates published in 1976 his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" that crystallized this argument. He claimed that if software was freely shared it would prevent the writing of good software. He basically argued that closed source software development (not a term of the time) was necessary.
The point of my paper was to show that it was possible to build larger software systems without being closed source software. Even at the time, people were being paid to develop some of that software, but the point was that sharing of software under a generous license did not end software development at all. I think my paper did the job. You can argue many things, but no one argues that open source software cannot be used to build big systems. We have existing systems, measureably large, that refute the claim.
Author here! I was surprised to see this on hacker news, it's a blast from the past.
Ask me anything!
Wheeler put out a blog post:
https://dwheeler.com/blog/2012/02/14/
linking to this blog post:
https://blog.james.rcpt.to/2012/02/13/debian-wheezy-us19-bil...
Saying it's an update of this article. In case you don't like reading URLs, the newer blog post says Debian "wheezy" is worth $19 billion.
I consider this a simplistic analysis, because a closed-source Linux with a straightforward monetary pricetag would be worth a lot less in practice, since it would cease to be the de-facto OS for pretty much all new hardware products. Like BSD before it, which got ported to most workstations because it was freely available, Linux derives a good deal of its value from the fact you can port it to anything that doesn't run away quickly enough without having to pay money or even negotiate to license it from anyone.
Also, this pinged a few neurons deep in my memory, so I found what it made me remember. Back in 2004, some random named Jeff V. Merkey tried to buy a special license to the then-current kernel for $50,000.00:
https://dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html
In response, Molnar did some quick sloccount math and estimated the kernel as being worth $175,974,824 at that time.
> Also, this pinged a few neurons deep in my memory, so I found what it made me remember. Back in 2004, some random named Jeff V. Merkey tried to buy a special license to the then-current kernel for $50,000.00:
> https://dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html
> In response, Molnar did some quick sloccount math and estimated the kernel as being worth $175,974,824 at that time.
Absolutely.
Just to clarify: Molnar first did the quick sloccount math and estimated $176 million USD. However, Molnar used the estimation values appropriate for an application.
But in fact, operating systems kernels are known to be more difficult to develop than typical applications. So I used the same approach but refined it to use parameters appropriate for a kernel. The article https://dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html is really a response to Molnar's work; he did a rough estimate, I did a slightly-more-refined estimate. Those additional tweaks resulted in a higher redevelopment cost of $612 million (USD). Which gave the $50,000 offer an even bigger contrast.
The real point was that, even if it would have been possible accept $50K, it was absurdly low. You could argue about the estimate for a factor of 2, or 10, or even 100, and it still wouldn't change anything.
> I consider this a simplistic analysis, because a closed-source Linux with a straightforward monetary pricetag would be worth a lot less in practice, since it would cease to be the de-facto OS for pretty much all new hardware products.
It's necessarily an estimate, of course. The best way to get effort figures would be to record every minute used for development, and the best way to get cost figures would be to re-develop from scratch. That wasn't practical, so using a widely-accepted estimation system seemed like a reasonable approach.
It's true that this analysis doesn't tell you the purchase price. However, I wasn't trying to estimate the purchase price. I was trying to estimate the cost to develop the software, if it had been developed using traditional closed source practices. If Linux had been developed by a for-profit organization to make a profit, the organization would have planned on charging more that that (in aggregate among all its users), since otherwise they'd be knowingly developing the software at a loss. That doesn't mean that the company actually could have charged this, as it often happens that products don't make a profit, but that's different from intent. And this is all different from value. If a product has value to you that's more than it costs to get, then economically you should consider getting it.
No matter what, these time and money figures can only be rough estimates. However, I think they were useful, because they destroyed a false assumption many had at the time.
In the 1980s and 1990s many people presumed that large-scale systems could NOT be developed as open source software. People did sometimes share software, but it was widely assumed that this could only be successful for small programs. The term "open source software" didn't even exist until 1998. The term "free software" was coined in the early 1980s, so that definitely was a discussion point. However, many people didn't think you could build larger systems with software licensed that way.
Bill Gates published in 1976 his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" that crystallized this argument. He claimed that if software was freely shared it would prevent the writing of good software. He basically argued that closed source software development (not a term of the time) was necessary.
The point of my paper was to show that it was possible to build larger software systems without being closed source software. Even at the time, people were being paid to develop some of that software, but the point was that sharing of software under a generous license did not end software development at all. I think my paper did the job. You can argue many things, but no one argues that open source software cannot be used to build big systems. We have existing systems, measureably large, that refute the claim.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.