# e-softw: Linux Foundation: A $5 Billion Value

<< The rise of open source projects and foundations has been much discussed, but the code investment underpinning them has not been analyzed in much detail. Many of the Linux Foundation’s  collaborative  projects  started  with  significant  code  donations  from  companies or existing projects. Once they became a fully open and collaborative project with neutral governance, many companies and individuals engage in development. Because of that, there is no single source for cost estimates of how much it would take to develop the technology or an understanding of how much value these projects actually deliver to the industry. >>

<< As of last month [August 2015], 115,013,302 total lines of source code were present in The Linux Foundation’s collaborative projects. Using the COCOMO model, we estimated the total amount of effort required to retrace the steps of collaborative development to be 41,192.25 person-years. In other words, it would take a team of 1,356 developers 30 years to recreate the code base present in The Linux Foundation’s current collaborative projects listed above. We estimate the total economic value of this work to be over $5 billion. >>

Jeff Licquia, Amanda McPherson. A  $5  Billion  Value: Estimating the Total Development Cost of Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects.  A  Linux  Foundation  publication

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation/estimating-total-development-cost-linux-foundation-collaborative-projects