An infographic has been attached to the article

Oct 1, 2015 01:18 GMT  ·  By

In a recent blog post, The Linux Foundation, through Amanda McPherson, announces a report that strives to answer the following question: "What does it cost to build world's technology infrastructure?"

The Linux Foundation's report, which is based on the well-known COCOMO code analysis method, estimates the total development costs of a collaborative project to $5 billion (€4.4 billion). While analyzing the code in their project's Git repositories, The Linux Foundation discovered some impressive numbers, such as the presence of a total of 115,013,302 lines of source code in the organization's collaborative projects.

Thanks to the COCOMO method, they managed to estimate the total amount of effort that is required for backtracking the steps of collaborative development to around 41,192.25 person-years, which means that it would take about 30 years for a team of 1,356 developers to recreate the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects code base. As such, this effort is estimated to more than $5 billion (€4.4 billion).

The Linux kernel has over 15 million lines of code

"Can the principles and practices of Linux be transferred to other industries? We at The Linux Foundation certainly think so and apparently so does the industry. Over the last few years every major technology category has been taken over by open source," says Amanda McPherson. "We've based our findings on a well known code analysis method called COCOMO to analyze all the code in our projects’ code repositories on Git. The results were impressive."

In the same report, The Linux Foundation estimates that the lines of code present in their current collaborative projects will fill 1,200 paperback books, not to mention the fact the the Linux kernel alone has over 15 million lines of code. An infographic that summarizes everything that was written in the Linux Foundation's report has been attached to this article, so we suggest that you take a look at it below because the numbers are indeed impressive!

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Estimating the total development costs of collaborative projects
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