What's The Linux Kernel Worth? 376
schneelocke writes "What's the value of the Linux kernel? After an offer by one Jeff V. Merkey to pay 50K USD for a BSD-licensed copy of Linux, David Wheeler does some calculations and comes up with an estimate of 612M USD." Wheeler has come up with a number of interesting software-worth estimates and other quantified facts about Free software; since some aspects involve ineffables and hypotheticals, the details can be argued, but he provides a good framework with SLOCCount.
sell linux ? who can do that ? (Score:1, Informative)
Cost vs Value (Score:2, Informative)
For example, Windows is *worth* more than it costs to produce (based on profit margins), meaning people are willing to pay more than it takes to make it, which is another way of saying that Windows is worth more to consumers than it costs to make.
Now, windows is a monopoly so the price tends to go towards the worth of the product, not the cost. Linux is highly competitive (with many distributions), and the price tends towards the cost of the product. Therefore, it is very difficult to calculate the value of the kernel since the Linux market is based on the costs, not value.
Re:Nothing (Score:3, Informative)
Misconceptions (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't about a consumer price for a kernel binary. Comparisons with copies of Windows are irrelevant. The $612 million dollars quoted is a suggested figure representing the kind of cost a commercial company would have to take on to develop an identical operating system kernel.
Software companies have in the past changed hands for large sums of money. The brand is of course worth some of that money, as are relationships with existing customers, but a large part of that value is the IP possessed by the company. There are few companies that have possessed software assets of a complexity and widespread use comparable to the Linux kernel that have changed hands, and such companies when sold have been bought for large sums - to pick one example, Netscape was bought by AOL at a price tag of $4.2 billion dollars.
The value of the Linux kernel code and Linux branding, if a company with sufficient resources were interested in obtaining it, and if it were for sale, would quite probably exceed this figure of $612 million by a sizeable percentage.
$50K is a derisory offer for even an non-exclusive right to develop and redistribute the IP, which is effectively what a solitary copy under the BSD licence would give. Certainly the company I work for would laugh helplessly if such an offer was made for our code, which is several orders of magnitude smaller and less complex than the kernel.
Savant
Merkey works for SCO (Score:3, Informative)
Gentlemen, at this time, I ask that you don your tinfoil hats.
with BSD you don't
Exactly. Now, suppose you want to sell licenses to people for using your IP in Linux, but people tell you "hey, that's under GPL - you distributed it, so you can't charge a license fee."
Merkey's company wants to sell modified Linux without providing source code to the modifications.
Yes, yes it does. Think about that - think about the lawsuit - perhaps they were thinking that they could snow the kernel devs into selling them a "get out of jail free" (perhaps even in a literal sense) card for $50.000.
Re:pretty safe offer (Score:5, Informative)
While there are some benefits to having a single copyright holder, you need a lot of bookkeeping to track everyone's copyright assignments and a lot of work to make sure they are proper. US copyright law requires that any copyright assignment be in writing and identify (in writing) exactly for what works copyrights are being assigned. Many European countries recognize "natural rights" or "droits d'auteur" that cannot be assigned to a third party. Some programmers have employment contracts that stipulate all software copyrights for things they write while employed belong to their employer, even if the software was written on the programmer's own time. Et cetera.
Linus decided either the effort was not worth it or that there were other benefits to not requiring copyright assignments. The Free Software Foundation does go to the effort to work all the details out. If you (or anyone else) wants to have a single copyright holder for a GPLed program, I encourage you to assign that copyright to the FSF. It saves a lot of effort on your part and ensures that the copyright holder has both the resources and resources to protect the software.
Jeff Merkey - Canopy Group - SCO (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nothing (Score:2, Informative)
I work a regular IT related job for a regular company. We use Linux a little bit for some tasks though we are not a Linux shop.
At one point we were in need of a new feature (awareness of a certain protocol in the kernel's NAT). Finding the feature unavailable, I did about a week of kernel hacking to implement it myself. It wasn't hard, much of that time consisted of figuring out how everything worked and doing testing.
Now the specific patch was not of much public interest and it was for an old kernel version so I didn't contribute it back to the kernel. If it had been something that would have been useful to others, though, I could easily have done so.
I think this is just one example of many that demonstrates the principle that although Linus does not pay for patches, plenty of people are paid to write them all the time.
Re:Why (Score:3, Informative)
BSD/OS was not the only proprietary fork. There were literally dozens. From an article by Eugene Kim: "Indeed, most of the commercial versions of UNIX in the 1980s were based on BSD UNIX". A partial list of BSDs was prepared by Levenez for his UNIX History [levenez.com]. And don't feel tempted to discredit or dismiss Levenez just because SCO intentionally misrepresents the information on his website. Levenez is a decent bloke who does a good job of documenting UNIX history.
I fail to see what relevance that has to my comment.
I disagree.