The Linux Foundation Releases First-Ever Value of Collaborative Development Report

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 30, 2015) - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the immediate release of its first ever report that attempts to measure the estimated value of development costs in its Collaborative Projects. The report is titled "A $5 Billion Value: Estimating the Total Development Cost of Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects."

Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. More than 500 companies and thousands of developers from around the world contribute to these open source software projects that are changing the world in which we live.

"Over the last few years every major technology category has been taken over by open source and so much opinion has been shared about the proliferation of open source projects, but not about the value," said Amanda McPherson, vice president of developer programs and CMO at Linux Foundation, and co-author of the report. "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 new report's findings are based on David A. Wheeler's proven COCOMO Model, which he pioneered in 2002 to inform what became a well-regarded study that assessed the value of a Linux distribution (The Linux Foundation performed a similar assessment in 2008). It assesses the Software Lines of Code (SLOC) in a project and the estimated person years and development costs associated to produce a value of the development costs (more detail is provided in the complete report).

The new report, "A $5 Billion Value: Estimating the Total Development Cost of Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects," is the first attempt to estimate the cost of how much it would take to develop the technology and understand the value these projects collectively deliver to the industry.

Using Wheeler's model, key findings in the report include:

• The total lines of source code present today in Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects are 115,013,302.
  
  
• The estimated, total amount of effort required to retrace the steps of collaborative development for these projects is 41,192.25 person years.