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: The Linux Foundation has released a report estimating the Linux kernel to be worth $1.4 billion , and the Fedora 9 distribution to be worth just over $10 billion. The report is an update of a 2002 report estimating the worth of Red Hat Linux 7.1 (Fedora is the community edition of Red Hat Linux, renamed in 2003). The report doesn’t attempt to estimate the worth of the total Linux ecosystem, as some early speculators suggested it would, but instead sticks to the hard facts. The estimation is an industry standard formula-based analysis of current lines of code in the Linux kernel (7 million) and Fedora packages (200 million), calculating what it would cost to develop the kernel and Fedora distribution from scratch under present-day developer salaries and operating costs. The original and updated reports both include the kernel in the calculation of the distribution as a whole, but the new report breaks out a separate figure for the kernel, highlighting its significance within the distribution.

One important perspective to carry away from this report is the astounding pace of Linux development. The 2002 report, which used the same tools for counting lines of code, and the same formulas for calculating total cost of development, listed Red Hat Linux 7.1 as worth $1.2 billion. There was some variation in the Fedora packages used for the the two reports, and for the sake of comparison the current report offers an alternate calculation using the lower operating costs of 2002 ($8 billion instead of $10 billion).

Even so, we’re looking at a distribution that’s worth seven times what it was worth six years ago.