How many billions is open-source software worth?

[ Thanks to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]

"That's the number that Black Duck Software came up with. Black Duck isn't an open-source ISV (independent software vendor). The Boston area company started as an IP (intellectual property) risk management and mitigation company, but has since grown into an open-source legal management firm.

"Since Black Duck was founded in 2002, the company has been tracking all known open source on the Internet According to their research, there are over 200,000 open-source projects representing over 4.9 billion lines of code. To create that code from scratch, Black Duck estimates that "reproducing this OSS would cost $387 billion and would take 2.1 million people-years of development.""

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• What would the open source community do with $US9.1 billion?(Apr 20, 2009)
• Geekonomics 101(Apr 10, 2009)
• The Cost Savings of FOSS: Business Success for the Wrong Reason(Apr 01, 2009)
• Red Hat Stands Alone, For The Better(Mar 30, 2009)
• Torvalds: Real Quality Means Taking it Personally(Oct 28, 2008)
• The Value of Freedom: Linux Kernel Worth $1.4 Billion(Oct 28, 2008)