Fedora 9 Would Cost $10.8B To Build From Scratch 293
ruphus13 writes "The Linux Foundation's recently released report claims, '... it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars with today's software development costs.' The article states why this might actually understate the value of the distros, though, since it doesn't include the power of the brand and the goodwill value. 'There were several approaches that the Linux Foundation employed to reach the $10.8 billion dollar figure, including calculating the number of lines of code in Fedora 9 (204,500,946), and using an average programmer's salary of $75,662.08 — as determined by the US Department of Labor — to measure development costs ... On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset.'"
Oh yeah? Guess what Microsoft can do! (Score:3, Funny)
They can spend twice that much money and only deliver a tenth of the functionality! That's a win! I think.
Uh, Goofy Accounting (Score:5, Informative)
Goodwill only shows up on the balance sheet when an acquisition or some similar event occurs which creates a discrepancy between the purchase amount and the balance sheet of the acquisition.
You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.
Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting (Score:5, Funny)
You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.
And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.
Re:Uh, Goofy Accounting (Score:5, Funny)
You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.
And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.
Economics does not use Balance Sheets, that would be your Accounting course. Perhaps that is why you failed?
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You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.
And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.
Economics does not use Balance Sheets, that would be your Accounting course. Perhaps that is why you failed?
No, I seem to remember having to do something that looked like a balance sheet in my micro-economics class. I remember in accounting doing a different type of balancing. Those numbers always came out correct, though.
'Misc' is your friend!
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You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.
And THAT is why I failed my economics class. My teacher never did appreciate my 'creativity'. I would simply explain that I wanted to be a CEO someday.
Economics does not use Balance Sheets, that would be your Accounting course. Perhaps that is why you failed?
His teacher failed him because his improper application of the wrong tools in the wrong field could lead him to politics.
What is a trademark's value called? (Score:2)
Goodwill only shows up on the balance sheet when an acquisition or some similar event occurs which creates a discrepancy between the purchase amount and the balance sheet of the acquisition.
If "goodwill" is not the right word for the value of intangible assets such as trademarks, what is?
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If "goodwill" is not the right word for the value of intangible assets such as trademarks, what is?
Start by picking some word that doesn't already have a specific alternate meaning in the same context.
Re:What is a trademark's value called? (Score:4, Informative)
"Goodwill" is a specific subset of "intangible assets". Other items such as patents, copyrights, trademarks or other contractually transferable rights or privileges would be in the same category, but are not "goodwill", which has a specific meaning in accounting.
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Re:What is a trademark's value called? (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, Goodwill is the correct term.
Has GP looked at GE's balance sheet? [ge.com]
GE claims $4.5 billion in "Licenses, Patents, and Trademarks". While the GP is correct that these values primarily arise as a function of acquisitions or sale of assets, the only time that corporate evaluations really matter is during acquisitions, sale of assets, and other forms of stock/ownership valuations.
Let me put it the way GE puts it (and GE is the *gold standard* when it comes to Goodwill, except for perhaps the Federal Reserve, who has a totally invented balance sheet.) There are 9 companies with triple A credit ratings, and GE's ability to manage accurately manage goodwill is one of the reasons it is a triple A rated company.
Upon closing an acquisition, we estimate the fair values of assets and liabilities acquired and consolidate the acquisition as quickly as possible. Given the time it takes to obtain pertinent information to finalize the acquired companyâ(TM)s balance sheet, then to adjust the acquired companyâ(TM)s accounting policies, procedures, books and records to our standards, it is often several quarters before we are able to finalize those initial fair value estimates. Accordingly, it is not uncommon for our initial estimates to be subsequently revised.
Emphasis added for the benefit of readers.
You *do* just stick those things on your balance sheet; the issue is being able to justify them. If I put my good name on a financial statement to a bank, the bank probably won't take me seriously, unless my name is something like "Warren Buffet". If my name is "GE", and I "give" that name to some business effort, it is a very serious transaction with serious financial consequences, and I can potentially use that to either buy or sell assets, as well as finance offers, and issue debt.
The credibility of the "good will", and the managers who evaluate the relevant values is what determines the financial values of those intangibles. They're only intangible in that they are intellectual concepts, and in many ways are just as "real" as stock or other corporate paper holdings.
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Not if you want to remain free from investigation of fiscal impropriety (as a catch-all term for the various statutes you'd be violating).
Goodwill is a "soft" number a lot of time, in the sense that it is subjective -- however, there are USGAAP methods required for calculating goodwill based on estimates of future profitability (which is the whole process of valuation). When your balance sheet indicates a value
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your own post suggests that past history suggests that GE has been very good at Correctly Valuing 'goodwill' on balance sheets in a real world stock market valuation proposition.
so they're not making up numbers. they're taking numbers and applying them to facts that are known to insiders, and creating a number that approximates the real value in dollars of that factual information.
knowledge is power, and in this case, power equals money. it's the calculation of how much knowledge equals how much power, and
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You don't just make up a number and add it onto your balance sheet.
But you just said that you do!
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Subtracting the balance sheet value from the purchase price is not "making up". Subtraction is not magic to many people.
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True it should not be used on an accounting sheet but Goodwill is defiantly something to be considered when setting the buying or selling price of a company. Why do you think it was Lenovo wanted so badly to keep the thinkpad brand name when the took it over from IBM?
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Why shouldn't it be used on an accounting sheet?
Are the trademark's IBM, or Pledge, or Clorox worthless?
The defining ability to sell products in those categories might actually be the name you sell them under! It could potentially be the *most* important factor, above and beyond support, product quality, even price!
This is *very* *real*.
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Because there is no proper way to value it, show me the formula for figuring out the value of a name brand..
Dunno, but it's worth something (Score:2)
Through the years car manufacturers have put "Handling tuned by Lotus" on their cars as a selling point. Lotus has immense goodwill on the handling front, as the name is practically synonymous with excellent handling.
Thus the goodwill for Lotus is that manufacturers will continue to come to them for handling expertise (much of Lotus' business is engineering contracts). The reputation (goodwill) ensures repeated business for Lotus and increased sales for their customers who advertise the Lotus involvement. L
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Lots of companies do exactly that, but they call it "brand valuation" or something similar.
Paying programmers by lines of code... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is like paying airplane manufacturers by weight.
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True. But estimating the costs it is a better mechanism. A heavier airplane is normally more expensive to build. So it probably trends that an estimate cost is proportional by the weight of the airplane.
The same thing with coding. Saying programmer A is more valuable then programmer B because programmer A wrote more lines, is of course stupid. As they are doing different things, or approaching the solution differently. However using lines of code when you don't have other variables (eg. man hours, skill s
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There might be something to this though.
1 year I wrote about 750,000 lines of code to kick off a new system. (15% comments).
The guy sitting 1 cube over was on a production support project... bug fixes, small enhancements.
We were both making about $80,000 at the time.
A clear difference in productivity. I've been promoted since then & have goten raises. But if I was getting paid by lines of code to make that salary, the other guy would probably be have a salary qualifying him for extreme poverty.
Erm! (Score:5, Funny)
[...]to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars[...]
I'd rather build it in C with a modest compiler.
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And it would crash, hard, every couple of years and you would need the federal government to reboot it. Not a good idea. Go with the C compliler.
I'd rather see... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd rather see... (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, goodwill is an asset? (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if I can spend some of my karma down at Taco Bell for a burrito?
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Re:Wow, goodwill is an asset? (Score:5, Funny)
No, but when you die you will be reborn at Taco Bell *as* a burrito.
That's karma!
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I'm glad you finally figured out what Karma is, Randy!
Now let's go over to Crabman's for a beer!
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How much money did MS spend on Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
According to an Inquirer article, the estimates were about $10 billion [theinquirer.net].
I would think it would cost more than $10.8 billion to develop FC9 from scratch then...since it's a better OS.
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At last! We finally live in the days when money throwing money at a project can magically make the results better!
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Only $427.33 on eLance (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet if you put the specs on eLance, there'd be a company in Romania somewhere bidding to do it for about $427.33, give or take a few dollars :)
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Well C is the most spoken language in Romania. ;)
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I bet if you put the specs on eLance, there'd be a company in Romania somewhere bidding to do it for about $427.33, give or take a few dollars :)
I've had my open source code plagiarized and sold on as their own work by a Romanian "development" company called fyb.ro [kuliukas.com] (though they sold it on for ~$4000 and my code is rather less than the linux kernel), but in principle I actually wouldn't be surprised at all. :-)
Lines =! quality =! true cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats not a fair comparisons of cost.
Especially since you are comparing lines of code in OSS to lines of code in CSS, Its like comparing 2 fruits, they are close, but not the same.
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so you've worked on both kinds. if i gave you 1000 lines of code, minus the legal garbage, you could tell me which is which then?
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Actually, yes i have worked on both free and commercial code and its not fair to compare the two in line count=dollars.
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I was trying to avoid that cliche :)
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Imagine... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?
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Firefox and the Debian dunc-tank experiment have demonstrated that money does not necessarily make open source projects better.
No (Score:2)
If I want to pay for software I'll buy it , I don't want to have to start paying for it through friggin taxes FFS!
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Insightful)
The last time I checked, you couldn't stop a suicide bomber by throwing a copy of Fedora 9 at them.
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?
To take the military: Forget, for a second, contemporary specifics of what you may or may not support. But in general, what is your freedom worth? Do you really think that you would still have it if the American military decided to completely disband? How long do you think it would tak
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There can be no such thing as a bad guy: value-judgements are almost always out of place in conventional language, and this kind of (unconscious) hate-mongering seriously contributes to war and other cultual conflict.
Oh, please. Do the "bad guys" think they're bad? Probably not. But who cares? Leaders of countries who practice genocide are "bad guys". Leaders of countries who invade other countries for expansionist goals are "bad guys". Roving gangs of men in Africa who steal children are "bad guys". Terr
But it wouldn't (Score:3, Insightful)
The number's a lot bigger than it needs to be.
Re:But it wouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure you would have "re-written" things.
Windows has/had 3 major competiting brands of office
productivity software.
Perhaps it wouldn't have all be developed by the same
company, but the products themselves would have been
developed. This just highlights the fact that a Linux
distro is no so much just an analog for a copy of
Windows but it also includes a freeware/commercial
equivalent of a Simtel or Tucows archive DVD.
This also exposes the real problem of competing with
Windows or MS-DOS if you are an alternative OS. You
not only have to compete with the core OS you also
have to compete with all of the 3rd party apps.
I'd be curious what the proposed dollar value of the
entire Ubuntu software repository "multiverse" would
be.
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Which existed *long* before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye - as did many of the tools used to create Linux (like GCC, and other GNU utilities).
Not to troll, but if Linux wasn't around, we wouldn't build it from scratch, we'd simply use something else - like BSD, which was also here before Linux.
"Good will" does not mean what you think it means (Score:3, Insightful)
> On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill
> listed as a major asset.
"Good will" is a specialized accounting term when used on balance sheets.
Re:"Good will" does not mean what you think it mea (Score:2)
What's the point of this? (Score:2)
Salary (Score:3, Insightful)
When reading this, I couldn't help but wish _I_ got paid that much money. The figure I get from sloccount ($55K) seems high, but this is even higher than that! Anybody want to make me an offer?
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It depends where you live, as it varies widely across states or countries. My fiancee (girl, who because of the way things are, on average, gets paid less than a guy with equivalent experience) in Boston, straight out of school with no experience (no internship aside for Summer of Code, not a single job on her resume, very average GPA), got her first job at 80000$ USD + bonuses and advantages, and got a 5% raise within 4 months.
Now, imagine someone with actual experience, consultants, architects, etc that a
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In all seriousness (Score:3, Insightful)
real cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Average salary? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps you should consider working on something other than an open source project :)
Re:Average salary? (Score:4, Interesting)
You make $3.78/hr ?
Where I live people who make $75k have to live in an apartment, and it is unlikely they will be approved for a home loan without at least 30% down (around $150k). If you save aggressively on that sort of salary it should only take about 5-7 years to scrap together enough money for your down payment. Once you have the house, I'm not sure how you pay the mortgage (roughly $3k/month).
For you it will take closer to 70 years.
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Buy a smaller house or condo. 30% down? Usually its 20%. The housing in your area sounds a tad overpriced to me or your example is just another case of living beyond one's means.
Lastly, home purchasing in the US is priced for couples, not individuals.
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Median home price hit 625k here. A bad place in the bay is about 425k, condos *start* at 450k and quickly move to 550k.
In the Bay Area, buying a house (or condo) with a single $75k/yr income is a "case of living beyond one's means."
What do you mean by "overpriced"? The term has no real meaning if you consider supply and demand. What is the worth of a house? Wouldn't it be what people are willing to pay? How you can "overprice" something, but still manage to sell it? You may feel that the price is excessivel
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Median home price hit 625k here. A bad place in the bay is about 425k, condos *start* at 450k and quickly move to 550k.
I'm gonna have to call "shenanigans" on your $$ figures there. According to this [trulia.com] it would appear there are plenty of homes one could buy that are FAR less than your supposed $625K "median" price.
While we're on it, according to this [dailypundit.com]:
A total of 7,271 new and resale houses and condominiums sold last month in the nine-county region, marking a 0.5 percent uptick from August. The median sales price fell 36 percent from a year earlier to a five-year low of $400,000, MDA DataQuick said.
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I'm gonna have to call "shenanigans" on your $$ figures there. According to this [trulia.com] it would appear there are plenty of homes one could buy that are FAR less than your supposed $625K "median" price.
That's the wrong point to make. Half of the homes (give or take half of a house) would be under the "median price", in either case. Unlike the mean, how far some go above or below it doesn't affect it. If the prices were $5, $5, $5, $60000, $80000, $80000, and $85000, $60000 would be the median.
You do appear to be correct about his first figure (the "bad place in the Bay" being wrong, though.
A total of 7,271 new and resale houses and condominiums sold last month in the nine-county region, marking a 0.5 percent uptick from August. The median sales price fell 36 percent from a year earlier to a five-year low of $400,000, MDA DataQuick said.
$400,000 / .64 = 625,000. It did "hit" 625K, evidently, but certainly isn't there any more.
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As I wander around San Francisco, I see people living in some pretty squalid housing. I think to myself, "that's a 2 million dollar property? How? And how does that guy manage it?"
I get the impression that there might be affordable housing in San Francisco, though not the really desirable kind of housing that goes for $1000 per square foot.
I could be wrong, but then, the market still bears ridiculous pricing. It means you either need equity in the market, or it means that enough people have enough incom
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No necessarily to the parent, but the GP, there are places in the US where you can live very comfortable on $50-$75k per year. Mostly smaller towns 100-150 miles from major metropolitan areas. I'm thinking Chicago's Rockford, or Elgin. Or any of the various industrialized suburbs of Milwaukee, or Brookfield, WI, or similar towns.
Take out an FHA loan on a cheap property, something that needs a lot of love, and put in the work yourself (that way you *know* the value will go up; it's not appreciating, its swea
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there are places in the US where you can live very comfortable on $50-$75k per year. Mostly smaller towns 100-150 miles from major metropolitan areas.
And then the salary would be even smaller than $50-$75k. I'm an employee of a small online toy and hobby retailer in northeast Indiana, and my boss and I are having trouble finding enough work to take me from part-time to full-time.
Re:Average salary? (Score:5, Funny)
In America, homeownership, like college, is a capitalist trap designed to force you into lifelong slavery. Fuck the house, own your life.
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what mental illness requires such investment on your part?
I blame my former unemployment on a combination of 1. poor interview performance due to my failure to completely hide a mild case of autism [wikipedia.org], 2. a surplus of labor in my sector four years after the height of the dot-com bubble, when people who had gone to university for the money were graduating, and 3. restricting my job search to within reasonable public transport distance of my relatives.
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If I had a nickle for every time I heard a geek claim Aspergers, I'd have roughly 500 cents.
"A comprehensive assessment involves a multidisciplinary team that observes across multiple settings, and includes neurological and genetic assessment as well as tests for cognition, psychomotor function, verbal and nonverbal strengths and weaknesses, style of learning, and skills for independent living." .. I'm not saying this was not done for you specifically. But generally when I hear someone claiming this, it is
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Well damn, all this time I was wearing latex gloves.
Plus you save on water too.
What's the name for the personality quirk where you hate mainstream political parties? Cuz I have that one.
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I suggest we form a support group.
Best description of the Libertarian party Evah!
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I wouldn't exactly call Asperger's an illness. However, since you're a geek on the spectrum, take a look at my current project: http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/ [quinncoincorporated.org]
I'm making a custom Ubuntu distro for young kids, specifically kids with special needs, like Asperger's.
Re:Grinding [Offtopic] (Score:2)
I really like the idea and design, although my daughter (no Asperger's) is still a few years from using a computer. Keep up the good work, and I'll revisit the site in a bit!
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Is it necessary to inform potential employers that you're bipolar? I don't see the need.
FWIW, I'm bipolar too. But my meds keep it completely under control.
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Got it in 1.
I live here because I can find lots of work. I just don't plan on buying a home here while rent is relatively cheap compared to a mortgage. I can invest the difference in money somewhere else while the housing bubble deflates a bit.
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There was that study a couple of years ago that showed that top programmers are 4x as productive as the average ones.
So hire a bunch of top programmers and pay 'em twice that rate, and you'll still halve development costs.
Of course, if the guys in charge of The Linux Foundation's estimation were actually top programmers, they'd have relized this. But noooooooo, they're trying to rhetorically prove a point.
I suppose if you hired 4x as many crappy programmers for half that rate, you can pay $20 billion to de
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It's also quite easy to do a 90 day trial for a job to evaluate performance. Many places do this and something similar. An acquaintance of mine started out working at Google as a contract worker - he works for the company for a limited amount of time (a year, I believe), and then they evaluate him at the conclusion of that time period and see if they want to bring him on board.
He now proudly sports his @google.com e-mail as he's a full-time employee. He's working for a good company and Google knows they hav
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Otherwise whatever corporation would have created it for 10.8B would have needed to sell it to nearly 200 million people at 50 bucks a pop to have broken even. Most likely they would have folded.
What a ridiculous sum pulled completely out of thin air.
Well its a good initial number. If you would like to refine, go ahead. Yes there are problems with the number. It doesn't take into account the lines of code thrown away, or that you should probably rate lines of code for different programs at different salary levels.
Even using this approach for the Windows code base would have problems. Just the fact that the code was developed over a period of time and subsets were present in older versions of the code. Also, the cost to rewrite it all from scrap might be
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Well its a good initial number. If you would like to refine, go ahead. Yes there are problems with the number.
Open source accounting too?
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Otherwise whatever corporation would have created it for 10.8B would have needed to sell it to nearly 200 million people at 50 bucks a pop to have broken even. Most likely they would have folded.
What a ridiculous sum pulled completely out of thin air
It's hardly rediculous. Although it does show the value of Free Software.
Many of us are old Atari or Amiga users are well acquainted with the problems of good products surviving in the marketplace.
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One more pun like that and they'll never find where you were beret'd.
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Yeah, you're right. I wouldn't want to be arrested for dis-turban the peace.
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They don't want to.
Also, they have completely different goals in software development. A MS programmer is doing whatever they have been told to do, and it is intended for use by the somewhat distant consumer.
A Linux programmer is either trying to improve something for himself or for the company he works for. Either way, he is much closer to the end-users for feedback.
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You forget all the other parts of a major project. Analyze, design, test. Those take people and hours away from simply pounding out lines of code.
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