Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt and Ron Hale-Evans over at the Linux Foundation just released a new report on estimating the total value of the GNU and Linux software stack. If you’ve been around for a few years you’ve seen similar studies by David A. Wheeler and Bill Weinberg. All three of the studies use the COCOMO software costing model. COCOMO is an algorithm that uses some some algorithms to estimate the cost of a software codebase from the number of lines of code and the cost of the engineering team to write the code.

COCOMO spit out that Fedora 9 was a $10 billion dollar nugget of code.

Those out there with a more cynical mind will likely start complaining about the model, the cost of the engineer, the biases of the study authors, etc.

Let’s ignore all of that and just be brutally honest: There is zero financial incentive to create new competitive proprietary operating systems. The costs are too high because the barrier to compete is set very high by Linux. You won’t get rewarded by the market for writing a new block disk layer or scheduling algorithm under a proprietary license.

What does this mean for the embedded systems market? Lack of new competitive threats against the surviving proprietary operating systems. With few new competitive options the investment that might go into product improvement that could benefit the common user is withering. You can see it already… the real competitive front for many of these companies has shifted to milaero. They duke it out adding new features that 99% of embedded developers will never use.

So what to do? You’ve got to make your move and find a comfortable orbit around the world of GNU and Linux. That’s the innovation center. $10B is part of the proof of that. Next you need to find a way to get the most benefit from this new world of open source.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.