The Billion Dollar Kernel 289
jesgar writes "The Linux kernel would cost more than one billion EUR (about 1.4 billion USD) to develop in the European Union. This is the estimate made by researchers from the University of Oviedo (PPT), whereby the value annually added to this product was about 100 million EUR between 2005 and 2007 and 225 million EUR in 2008. The estimated 2008 result is comparable to 4% and 12% of Microsoft's and Google's R&D expenses on whole company products. Cost model 'Intermediate COCOMO81' is used according to parametric estimations by David Wheeler. An average annual base salary for a developer of 31,040 EUR was estimated from the EUROSTAT. Previously, similar works had been done by several authors estimating Red Hat, Debian, and Fedora distributions. The cost estimation is not of itself important, but it is an important means to an end: that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition that would set it as an alternative to decision-makers. Ideally, legal and regulatory frameworks must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare."
I'm not sure COCOMO is a good measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Something based on lines of code like COCOMO is probably not a good estimate for a kernel. Kernel debugging is harder for one. Many of the drivers required some level of reverse engineering as well.
I'd say every "Kernel line of code" is probably worth 10 lines of code in userspace, if not more.
Re:Taxes (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should it be limited to successful projects? Since this is open source, even a failed project can be hugely beneficial to society in terms of code, ideas or even just experience. Plus, who would declare success? Would a "successful project" be one that gets 1000 downloads a month? Or would it be a project that has a certain amount of community involvement? These questions (and others) are way to vague to justify that clause. Simply allow companies to deduct a portion of taxes for time donated to an open source project as a charitable donation. Sure, there will be abuse, but you can't stop abuse, you can only try to limit it at a huge expense... Plus, I think that the benefits will outweigh the negatives to such a system...
Re:Seems a bit high (Score:4, Insightful)
Ramifications (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ideally, legal and regulatory framework must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Since the code has been released as open source, it isn't really an asset of the company that wrote it anymore than it is to anyone else who uses it. It isn't something that could be liquidated to pay off debts, and allowing them to specify it as an asset on their balance sheets seems like just another way to distort the books and confuse investors. I don't see any good coming out of that.
Secondly, I don't see the point in letting them receive tax deductions for their contributions. They made these contributions because it was in their best interest to do so regardless of the tax status. And while it is nice that their contributions help the community as a whole, they themselves are helped by contributions that others have made. If they weren't taxed on the later, why should they get a deduction for the former? Open source is already provides economic and social benefits to those that participate in it's development - government wealth distribution is not needed in a system that already does so inherently.
Finally, even if I did agree with these goals, I don't see how having an estimate of the cost of the kernel as a whole would help - what matters are the specific contributions of the company and there are better ways to figure that.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all about the apps and drivers - mostly the apps.
It does not matter how fast, secure, reliable, or inexpensive an OS may be; if it doesn't run the apps, it's not of much use.
Re:Salary (Score:1, Insightful)
One hand tied behind your back (Score:5, Insightful)
People who write windows drivers are usually given specs for the hardware.
Given the additional difficulty of reverse engineering, it's a miracle open source drivers work at all.
Re:Oops... (Score:2, Insightful)
Want to know WHY the Closed source drivers are better?
Closed source driver programmers get the full specs and all details of the hardware including several hardware samples in a test jig setup.
Open source driver programmers get NOTHING. they have to go out and buy the hardware, then buy equipment to reverse engineer it, spend months poking at it trying to figure out how it's supposed to work and then write a driver based on those assumptions.
IT does not have to be that way, it's just that hardware makers really enjoy being raging assholes and intentionally go out of their way to screw with Open Source developers because it's how they get their kicks and gives them something to brag about at parties. There is no legitimate reason for holding back the full hardware interface documentation. NONE.
Re:I'm not sure COCOMO is a good measure (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, I would say 10 is low. Every bug at the kernel level will be responsible for several orders of magnitude more bugs in userspace. It's not just a question of implementing to spec, it's a question of implementing to spec in a manner that is clear and consistent to every developer using the system.
Re:Did you intend to be condescending? (Score:4, Insightful)
The bread and butter of the open source community are not as high functioning as Linus et. al. A lot of software gets written because it's sexy to write rather than because it's needed. Windows and Mac OS X each have a single window manager and maybe two filesystems; Linux has hundreds of one and dozens of the other because they're sexy and fun to write. We have a half dozen version control systems where MS and Apple each maybe use one or two at most internally. Yet we have few working video drivers. This is a clear benefit of having paid programmers. They write fewer developer tools and spend more time improving existing user-facing stuff, because if they don't, they get fired.
Furthermore, a lot of green programmers start OSS projects to become better at programming. Very little commercial software is written entirely by new programmers. This is why it's hard to stay up-to-date in the Ruby community. A lot of the code is written by new Ruby programmers enamored with language features, and then it has to be thrown away and rewritten differently in the face of real-world demands. There's also more glory in starting projects with promise than in carrying through and maintaining older projects. Few people use FVWM2 even though it's stable, fast and highly configurable. Most Linux users today are probably using Metacity or KWM instead.
Most OSS projects reach a certain level of maturity, get stale and get abandoned, leading to this churn. That doesn't happen in the commercial world because code is perceived as having a dollar value. Sometimes, maybe even frequently, this belief is wrong or overestimated, but it does mean that commercial software is often older than OSS, which (IMO) compensates somewhat for the lack of eyeballs finding bugs. Age finds bugs too.
It's hard for me to imagine the world's most highly performing programmers not contributing to open source, but it's just as silly to expect that they aren't outnumbered by average programmers who don't have time to contribute, or that a dozen average programmers can't produce solid code. In many cases I find they produce simpler, more maintainable code because they're less inclined to the theatrics which are the chief form of compensation for OSS developers.
Of course he did (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on. This was an artfully crafted troll. Comparing open source to YouTube crap videos, without ever making a direct comparison, yet implying that most open source is like most crap videos: textbook propaganda. Then we have the 'real programmers' line, again implying that open source programmers are not real programmers, without ever stating it directly. Finally, there's the 'twenty experts' line, again, implying that no open source programmers are experts.
Seriously, people pay good money to learn how to write propaganda of that quality. And people who are that good at writing propaganda get paid very, very well. I wonder who 'useful wheat' is working for?
Paving the way for a download tax (Score:3, Insightful)
Though the study only considers the kernel, a starting point has been established. Downloading an entire operating system for free (other than ISP charges) denies the state the revenue from sales/VAT tax that would have been paid on shrink-wrapped product. The downloader receives benefit from the download similar to the benefit received by someone who purchased the shrink-wrap product. Should the downloader be taxed similarly to the tax-paying purchaser?
Now that a value is placed on something that is free, it is ready to be taxed like any other product on the market. What I wonder is, did U of O undertake the study at the behest of the government.
Re:So, FLOSS developers; (Score:5, Insightful)
where is your paycheck? Hmmmmm?
My paycheck is in the code. For example, I wrote the Objective-C code generation stuff in clang for the GNU Objective-C runtime. Apple employees wrote most of the parsing logic. I get a full-featured Objective-C 2 compiler that I can use on non-Apple platforms. Apple gets some bugs fixed for free. Both of us get out more than we put in.
Re:Oops... (Score:0, Insightful)
No reason whatever to withhold hardware documentation?
Cheating in games. Wallhacks and such built into a graphics driver are extremely hard to detect. Remember a few years back when ASUS included a custom mode in a graphics driver for wireframe? The first thing it got used for out in the world was cheating at Counter-Strike. ASUS' reputation took a while to recover in the gaming community.
Sure, you could write a cheating driver without access to the documentation, but it's harder. Which I think you'll have to agree with--the difficulty of writing drivers without access to the hardware specs was part of your point. And of course, when it happens through reverse engineering, the chipmaker isn't really to blame. They can say, quite truthfully, "We did everything they could to make it hard."
So... say you're nVidia. What exactly do you have to gain by releasing the hardware specs? Why take the risk of estranging the lucrative market of high-end gamers by taking actions that could be seen as abetting cheaters? Why roll the dice on becoming the platform of choice for scum?
Re:Did you intend to be condescending? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea, I wish we could get mother nature to stop that evolution crap. It is a well proven failed model for building quality systems.
Re:31,040 EUR??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending on the big city, a car isn't a good investment anyway. Quite a lot of the large EU cities have excellent public transport options, respect for cyclists and parking that costs close to that of renting a studio flat ...
Essentially you can pretty much compare most large EU cities to that of Manhattan. You can own a car, but unless you work outside the city it's a waste of money
Re:lol wut? (Score:1, Insightful)
Can someone decode this for me?
"Donation to Social Welfare" means that an action benefits society as a whole. In this case the author is saying that companies that improve the kernel are doing something that benefits others, and perhaps governments should set up incentives to encourage this good behavior. A tax break ("equitable tax treatment") is given as an example.
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
Your in-built translation seems to be broken by your ideology. The fact that you believe something should not keep you from being able to read, even if you disagree with the author. Please don't insult Americans by pretending that this failure of your intellect inflicts all of us.
Re:lol wut? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can someone decode this for me?
Do they want to tax companies that sponsor F/OSS development? Or subsidize them? Or do they want the flexibility to do both, and will change their mind depending on which company and which year we're talking about?
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
In the US there are several very deeply entrenched political biases against the responsibility of the individual to society... so yes your background influences how you are taking both the words "social" and "welfare".
Try reading it this way instead;
"Developing commons-based software contribute towards improving the standard of living in a very real way. Most tax entities provide for tax deductions of goods and services to charitable organizations. If FOSS development was given the same tax-reducing benefit that donations to religious and political organizations have, this would greatly foster (and to an extent subsidize) corporate interest in creating, contributing, and releasing commons-based software."
If such development contributions can become "intangible assets" (things that have value but not a price tag), then they can be "donated" to a charitable non-profit. The non-profit then assesses a value for the donation, and this amount now becomes tax deductible to the company.
Since this wasn't clear I'm just guessing that "intangible assets", "equitable tax treatment", and "donation" are the real things that you didn't understand... and "social welfare" was just the political trigger that you focused on.
If you genuinely want to learn the complexity of taxes, capitalism, freedom, and responsibility; I'd recommend you change where you get your news from.
p.s. As a personal recommendation; if you're able to disarm your "political triggers" try NPR instead of the usual network ratings whores. You'll learn a lot rather than be told a lot.
Re:One hand tied behind your back (Score:0, Insightful)
Most FOSS stuff is literally just copying things that have already been done.
I had to stop reading right there. If you are actually implying that this statement doesn't exactly describe closed source software, you are living in a dream world. Actually, no, I think I'll read further. Let's see.
You think the OSS world has it hard writing an exchange client off its specs
Damn, this ignorant fool thinks MS invented email servers. It'd be funny were it not so sad. Let's keep going for further examples.
I imagine the Direct X people have similar problems.
DirectX= 1995 OpenGL = 1992. Next.
No, actually that about wraps it up. You go in accusing FOSS authors as basically unoriginal copycats and then you use as your examples of closed source efforts, excuse me, "engineering" (pompous much?), that are little more than reimplementations of ideas and products released long before.
tl;dr FOAD, troll.
Re:lol wut? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Social Welfare" can mean anything
Yes, but it in the US it only means "commie-style income distribution". It's a perfect example of reversed (corporate) doublespeak: By systematically equating social welfare with communism, the US government has succesfully tainted even the slightest notion of progressive tax systems (i.e. the largest shoulders carry the largest burden). The GP is a perfect example of that (but at least he is aware of it). It has come to the point where any non-uniform tax reform will be resisted by all layers of the population, regardless of whether they would benefit from it or not.
At least that's what it looks like from my non-American perspective...
Re:One hand tied behind your back (Score:3, Insightful)
Most FOSS stuff is literally just copying things that have already been done.
And that's different from commercial software how?
Seriously, developing software is far more complicated than that. Claiming that X copied Y is a dangerous accusation since it's extremely unlikely that Y came up with something without first seeing the same or similar ideas somewhere else.
Re:Taxes (Score:3, Insightful)
A Linux-powered missile targeting-system? An OpenBSD-based content-filter? A NetBSD-server running identity databases?.. FreeBSD traffic-shaping? Are you sure, you'll approve 0-taxes for all of those — and the "related activities"?
Seriously, as if tax-code is not complicated enough (to the point of harming the economy just by the complexity itself) — exactly by the people like you, who want to give their pet-project some sort of tax advantage... Using an open source software (or whatever else, for which the government is already giving tax-credits) is or ought to be advantageous on its own.
Instead we have hundreds of thousands very bright and highly educated (in both Law and Mathematics) people engaged in not doing anything truly productive, but helping others navigate through the complexities of the multi-volume tax codes... Sure, what's one more exception?
Re:One hand tied behind your back (Score:3, Insightful)
I too make my living producing closed source software and yes... coming up with the original spec is work. No, it's not as challenging as working with something someone has already done. Have you been tasked with fixing a bug or adding a feature to code someone else wrote? How about poorly written code with no comments? It's pretty tough. Now imagine you don't even get the code, just an inert chunk of hardware and maybe some pre-compiled binary file. Now make it work. Good luck! When it does work, that truly is a miracle.
Now, I don't know how much of the original design is done by Microsoft or Apple as opposed to the hardware manufacturer nor do I care. If they are working for the hardware manufacturer for free then that's their problem. When I buy a piece of hardware I expect a functional device which works on MY device. The driver isn't the product, it's just support. When did you last walk into the local computer store, pick up the box for the latest whiz-bang video card and see the words "We have the best driver" written on the front? It's the hardware they are selling, not the software.
If the manufacturer won't release the information I need to make the physical object I purchased with MY money work then something is wrong. If Microsoft or Apple are developing the drivers on behalf of the manufacturer in return for some exclusivity deal where the manufacturer keeps it a secret how to actually interface the hardware in order to lock the user into Windows or Mac then that is pretty shady. I don't care how common it is, one can point out that it's the norm and it's how the world works until they are blue in the face. It's still shady. The hardware manufacturer should be writing their own drivers and if I pay my hard earned cash to buy the hardware and I want to write a driver for some other OS they should be more than happy to release the information. I understand if my OS only has 3 users and they don't want to do the work themselves. Releasing the information just gives me and anyone else using the other OS an incentive to fork out more cash to buy more of the same hardware. After all if I did pay for the hardware I should get to use it to it's fullest potential.
Drivers should not be protected like big trade secrets. There's plenty of unique imaginary property in those chips that a company can keep on making money after it's drivers go public. Those drivers are still useless without hardware. Not many of us can press our own chips now can we? The easier it is to get that software the more valuable your hardware is. Now, I realize that in the last 10 years or so there has been a move to put more of the brains into the software in order to cheapen up the hardware. I can't really defend this practice as it has really just resulted in shoddy computers. If a more open driver development environment means those kinds of products start to go away then that's just another benefit.
Compare the situation today with 10 years ago. Most hardware manufacturers have cooperated with the open source community. When I stick that LiveCD in some random computer most of the devices really do work out of the box! What's left? Wireless and 3D. Here's the real story with that... First, wireless. Every country has it's own laws regarding radio. If you want to sell in a country your wireless product has to be certified to follow that countries regulations. For that reason most wireless chips are designed with full capabilities in every country it is going to be marketed in. Thus.. to market in any one place the device has to be crippled, channels are removed, power is lowered, etc... This could be accomplished easy enough by adding some fuse bits in the chip. Offending capabilities could be burnt off the chip with no way for a user to recover them. This would add some fraction of a penny to the cost of your wireless card and that would make 1 or 2 less sell to the unwashed masses at the local Walmart. Thus, the limits ar
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Insightful)