Published at LXer:

The company is called Ohloh, and was named after the first surfboard in Hawaii. Its mission will be to analyze open-source software projects and provide customers with detailed information about them, including how much it would cost to duplicate the project given an average programmer salary of US$55,000 per year. The Linux kernel, for example, clocked in at nearly 4.7 million lines of code, has had 1,434 man-years of coding effort put in so far, and would have cost approximately US$79 million in salaries. [This is the second story of this startup, and I still don't trust the founders. No reflection on the author of the story, as it is a very good report, but I don't think Ohloh ever read David A. Wheeler's Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More!. I'll trust Mr. Wheeler's well documented analysis long before taking the word of former MS execs. Their undocumented, asserted figure is only about 13% of what Wheeler estimates. Maybe this partially explains the incredibly low quality of MS software; after executives get done dipping in the revenue, the leavings for programmers are 13% of what is needed.-- grouch]

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