Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Many hands make valuable work


At least that is what this article claims.  ->http://bit.ly/Vw8gX

It values the linux kernel at 1.4 billion dollars. Thecalculation is based on a 200$/loc valuation and it calculates that the latest Linuxkernel has 7million lines of code.

Fedora 9 (a linux distribution) is valued at 10billion dollars J based on a 50$/loc cost for 200million lines ofcode.

 

Note: they wave their hand at the details of how theyarrived at these $$ figures.

Not sure why the $/loc is 4x more for the kernel thanfor Fedora (OS code is 4x more expensive than application code)?

 

Hrmm… impressive, is this accurate? Let us see

Yahoo – Market Cap – 17B which would implythat Yahoo has 170 million lines of code based on 100$/loc (in between Fedora9and Linux?)

Goog – Market Cap – 112B which would implythat Google has 745 million lines of code based on 150$/loc.

( this is 310,667 lines of code per day, every day for10 years  [745mill/10 = 74560000 /48 = 1553334/5=316666])

MSFT – Market Cap – 197B which would implythat Microsoft has 985million lines of code based on 200$/loc

(this is 181,159 lines of code per day, every day for23 years  [1B/23/48/5]) which would mean that google has been producingcode at 2x the rate of Microsoft. I am just saying J

 

Heh.. okay so I am done having fun with numbers. Mypoint is that while it sounds impressive to claim market valuation for Linuxand Fedora, I am not sold yet J.  I think if open sourcewants to be truly disruptive (as much as it claims to be) – it has tolearn how to also value itself differently than status quo.

 

 

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

No comments: