Fri Feb 17 16:05:48 EET 2012

What is the development costs of Debian GNU / Linux / How much costs the development of a Free Software projects

Free Software (FS) is free as in freedom as well as free as in price. Free and Open Source Software is developed by geek hobbyist which voluntarily put their time and effort in writting, testing and sharing with anyone for free million of lines of programming code. This doesn't mean however the price of free software costs is 0 (zero). Though the "end product" the Free Software developed is FREE, "real" software costs as with any other product costs huge money.

I've recently read on Jeb's blog an estimation on how much is the cost of one of the major Free Software project efforts - Debian GNU / Linux
According to James E. Bromberger - the whole Debian project was estimated to be at the shocking price of $19 billion - $19 000, 000, 000 !!!

Here is how JEB got the $19 billions, a quote taken from his blog:

"By using David A Wheeler’s sloccount tool and average wage of a developer of US$72,533 (using median estimates from Salary.com and PayScale.com for 2011) I summed the individual results to find a total of 419,776,604 source lines of code for the ‘pristine’ upstream sources, in 31 programming languages — including 429 lines of Cobol and 1933 lines of Modula3!

In my analysis the projected cost of producing Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR€14.4B, GBP£12.11B), making each package’s upstream source code worth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost).

James has done incredible job with this great research and he deserves applause.
However I believe the numbers proposed by his research are slightly different if we speak about realistic cost of Debian GNU / Linux.
The real costs of the working software ready to install on a user PC are way higher, as according to Jeb's research only the software cost basaed on code line count is considered.

Hence James software estimation calculates only the programming costs and miss many, many factors that constitute the software end cost. Some of the many, many REAL COST / expenses for developing a huge Free Software project like Debian GNU / Linux which should also be consired while talking about the project costs are:

  • the developers use of their own computers (hardware depreciation)
  • electricity bill of the volunteer (developer) working on the program or project
  • electricity bills for servers where free software is stored and available for download
  • volunteer developer IT skills and tech knowledge (KNOW HOW)
  • Internet, network, dial up bandwidth cost
  • a) bandwidth costs for hosting free software (on the server side)
    b) bandwidth cost for developers or FS users downloading the software
  • personal time put in FS development (programming, design, creativity etc.)! here the sub costs are long:
  • :

    a) Time spend to spread the word of the great added value of Debian and bundled software (Mouth by Mouth Marketing)
    b) Time spend to advertise Debian and its free software components on blogs, social networks (identi.ca, facebook, twitter) etc.
    (Voluntary online Marketing, SEO etc.)
    c) Time spend on generating ideas on future program versions and reporting them to Debian FS community
    d) Time on evaluation and feedback on software
    e) Time spend on managing free software repository (download) servers voluntarily (by system administrators)
    f) Time spend by users on Bug Tracking & Bug Reporting
    g) Time spend on research and self-actulization by software developer
    h) Time spend on software Quality Assurance
  • Costs for Project Management Leaders / Project Coordination
  • The complexity of each of the projects constituting Debian



  • This are most of the multiple factors which should, influence the cost of any non-free (proprietary software) project. No matter this costs apply for non-free software, it perfectly applies for free software as well.

    With all said if if we assume the non-programming costs are equal to the programming costs of $ 19 000 000 000 (suggested by Jeb). This means the real cost of Debian will presumably be $32 000 000 000. Where even putting $ 19 billion for all this long list of weighweight costs (besides pure source) factors is probably very under-scored number.

    A very interesting figure from Jeb's research is the Programming Languages break down by source code figure:

    Debian Wheezy Languages type used break down source code diagram

    The research reveals on the 4 major programming languages used in the 17000+ software projects (part of Debian GNU / Linux):

    • ANSI C with 168,536,758 - (40% of all projects source code)

    • C++ at 83,187,329 - (20% of all projects source)

    • Java 34,698,990 - (lines of code 8% of sources)

    • Lisp - (7% of all projects source code)



    The research also provides a general idea on how much the source code of some of the major FOSS projects costs. Here is a copy of his figures

    Individual Projects

    Other highlights by project included:

    Project Version Thousands
    of SLOC    		 Projected cost
    at US$72,533/developer/year
    Samba 3.6.1 2,000 US$101 (AU$93M)
    Apache 2.2.9 693 US$33.5M (AU$31M)
    MySQL 5.5.17 1,200 US$64.2M (AU$59.7M)
    Perl 5.14.2 669 US$32.3M (AU$30M)
    PHP 5.3.9 693 US$33.5M (AU$31.1M)
    Bind 9.7.3 319 US$14.8M (AU$13.8M)
    Moodle 1.9.9 396 US$18.6M (AU$17.3M)
    Dasher 4.11 109 US$4.8M (AU$4.4M)
    DVSwitch 0.8.3.6 6 US$250K (AU$232K)



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