Monket :: SLOC Smack Down

SLOC Smack Down

Okay, so if you want to argue about Open Source Software, and Linux particularly, with someone infected with Software Engineering, there is an eye-opening set of papers available from David Wheeler, rooted at Counting Source Lines of Code. The punchline:

My latest size-estimation paper is More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size (June 2001). Here are a few interesting facts quoting from the paper (which measures Red Hat Linux 7.1):

It would cost over $1 billion (a Gigabuck) to develop this Linux distribution by conventional proprietary means in the U.S. (in year 2000 U.S. dollars).
It includes over 30 million physical source lines of code (SLOC).
It would have required about 8,000 person-years of development time, as determined using the widely-used basic COCOMO model.
Red Hat Linux 7.1 represents over a 60% increase in size, effort, and traditional development costs over Red Hat Linux 6.2 (which was released about one year earlier).