Debian GNU/Linux = $19 billion
Debian developer James Bromberger recently posted the interesting ”Debian Wheezy: US$19 Billion. Your price… FREE!”, where he explains why the newest Debian distribution (“Wheezy”) would have taken $19 billion U.S. dollars to develop if it had been developed as proprietary software. This post was picked up in the news article ”Perth coder finds new Debian ‘worth’ $18 billion” (by Liam Tung, IT News, February 14, 2012).
You can view this as an update of my More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux’s Size, since it uses my approach and even uses my tool sloccount. Anyone who says “open source software can’t scale to large systems” clearly isn’t paying attention.
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