Linux Will Be Worth $1 Billion In First 100 Days of 2009
What's Linux worth? The question has been a favorite of technology groups and cocktail party conversations ever since a character named Jeff V. Merkey offered $50,000 for a copy of Linux. The offer was a ploy. Merkey wanted it under the BSD license, which would have undermined the terms of the GPL. So he didn't get it. But we know, at least, that $50,000 proved to be a low bid.
How would you set a value on Linux? It's widely used in highly competitive businesses, such as Travelocity, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Amadeus, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). It's used by start-ups. It's used by individual developers and in mainstream business.
Hungarian kernel developer Ingo Molnar in 2004 estimated it would cost $176 million to redevelop the 2.6 Linux kernel from scratch with paid programmers. The average salary, he estimated, would be $56,286, too low by today's standards. I don't know how many developers he figured would be needed, but his target kernel had 4.3 million lines of code.
David A. Wheeler, a northern Virginia author on Linux security, looked at Ingo's calculations when they came out and decided they were too low.
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re: Linux worth
So Chucky (the yahoo that wrote the article), does it hurt pulling those numbers out of your ass or what?