What do you think Linux's kernel value is in money today?

[Flame]

So my friends came over we play some games together. one of them said lets watch some stuff. i booted up my machine.

as i did one of my friends was going to boot to Windows i told him to boot Linux Mint. as my windows on this machine is bit plain and doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Linux mint.


he goes to me, "isn't "Linux" made by one guy?"

i go "yeah, the kernel in the start. was made by Linus Torvalds"

he goes "why don't you use windows its made by a 1 trillion dollar company."

then i go "in the start it was made one guy, but now since then its improved and much better and its worth over $10 billion worth of development and the value is priceless imo"

i showed this to them https://www.linuxfoundation.org/pre...ublishes-study-estimating-the-value-of-linux/

and this over 10 years ago

then one of them shouts "NERD!"




so what do you think Linux's kernel value is in money today?

 

[AmandaRose]

so what do you think Linux's kernel value is in money today?

To me its priceless I only ever use Windows on the very very rare occasions when what I am trying to do absolutely cannot be done on Linux.

 

[tech3475]

I think it's hard to say because it's open source/free nature means that any calculations are skewed.

In terms of actual usage, we're likely talking billions, if not trillions because of it's usage in corporate systems, communication, etc.

But then alternatives exist, if tomorrow say Linus got in a time machine and convinced his younger self to charge $1 per device, we'd all probably be using Hurd, FreeBSD or some other kernel.

At the end of the day though, does it matter? Just use what does the particular task the best e.g. My desktop runs Windows but my file server runs UNRAID because the latter is better than Storage Spaces.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Well the number of Linux devices (whether it's a small scale embedded implementation or used in a full blown OS) vastly outnumbers the number of Windows devices for sure (shit, I'm pretty sure just Android devices alone have a higher marketshare than all Windows devices at this point), so you should tell your friend to stop being a dumb hipster and to just choose Linux like a real man!

 

[Hambrew]

i mean, Caldera OpenLinux doesn't come close to costing 1 billion dollars, what u talkin about

 

[FAST6191]

Estimating values of this sort of thing might be harder than doing it for websites.

Some estimate cumulative work hours and multiply by rates over the years. That is one thing.

Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay, and there is a reason only companies pay for support (and that goes for MS as well).

Some figure out if given say 5 years and a reasonable supply of devs all racked and stacked in a company what could be done as far as making it.
At the same time do I really care about my ancient PCMCIA wifi card any more? Get as many of the popular laptop makes, desktops, server hardware, embedded device classes.
What sort of development has to be done? Linux is obviously based on Unix, as are many other things. If I can base it on a known standard then do I get 5 minute ports of things? If I have community-open source stuff going on do I lose some of my salary cost too?

What would said devs have to be? One that can get down and dirty with assembly, security and go all the way back up to be one of the mythical full stack types. Those code rather a lot more than barely squeaked through java school types.

That said whatever way I slice it I don't see it being not a lot of money.