There’s gold in them thar Linux hills “To replicate that amount of work, it’d take 1,356 developers 30 years.”
The Linux Foundation values the work of its collaborative projects at five billion dollars.
For many companies using open source software is a no brainer: you’re getting programs and suites made by some of the brightest minds in software development, free from the constraints and compromises that come with using closed source proprietary software. It can also end up saving the organisation a heck of a lot of money as well. By the start of September 2015 there were 115,013,302 lines of code in the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects, which includes such initiatives as Let’s Encrypt, the free open certificate authority, the Open Container Project, Node.js and Tizen. The Linux Foundation has calculated that the total economic value of all this work is around five billion dollars. In fact, if you wanted to replicate that amount of work (and by the time you read this many more lines will have been added), it would take a team of 1,356 developers at least 30 years.
The immense effort involved in coding Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects ( http://collabprojects. linuxfoundation.org, LFCP), along with the increasing complexity of modern applications, means that collaboration between companies using open source technology is often the only viable solution. This can go some way to explaining why we’ve begun seeing collaborations between companies that have been – or at least appeared to be – rivals in the past, as the LFCP has so far seen 500 companies work together to generate that amount of valuable code.
One of the most exciting aspects of the valuation of the code ( http://bit. ly/OpenSourceValueReport) is that it was generated in only a few years, demonstrating that collaboration and open source are the future – especially with software which is undergoing a massive shift to online services where speed and support are paramount.
While the Linux Foundation celebrates this impressive milestone, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) continues its 30th anniversary celebrations with a large party held in Boston and a talk by Richard Stallman, and a User Freedom Summit. Elsewhere around the world celebrations were held in Mexico, India, Brazil, Germany and France.
The FSF’s celebrations and the GNU Manifesto highlight how essential the original document was as, although the computing landscape was very different in 1985, three decades later there are still risks to software freedom.
Meanwhile the Linux Foundation’s landmark shows just how essential open source is to the modern computing world, and although the open source community has its fair share of disputes and the occasional demand for people to ‘fork off’, it also shows that old rivalries can be put aside with collaborative efforts that benefit not just the open source community, but also the wider world.
If you want to help the FSF continue for another 30 years then make sure you head to its appeal web page at
https://www.fsf.org/appeal to donate. In another 30 years the FSF hopes proprietary software will become extinct, and your donation could help that become a reality.
The FSF is seeking to raise $525,000 by the end of January next year, and if you become a member (for $10 a month or $5 for students), you’ll get a number of benefits, such as a 4GB memory card loaded with Trisquel Live, free entry to the LibrePlanet conference and a subscription to the biannual newsletter, the FSF Bulletin.