"No matter what Linux distribution or Open Source-based OS you use, be it Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, OpenSolaris, RHEL/CentOS, The BSDs, Mac OS X, or any myriad of others, absolutely none of this would be possible without the determined and often thankless work of thousands upon thousands of programmers. Recently, a study undertaken by the Linux Foundation determined that Fedora was valued at about 10 billion dollars in terms of real world development cost if the labor hours were translated into actual greenbacks spent for a comparable closed source product. I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate -- it could very well be much higher than that, since this estimate is not including all the years and years of work that went into the entire stack prior to Red Hat's involvement, and is a strictly by the numbers estimation based on lines of code (204 million)."
