"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)."
