Linux Foundation has estimated it would cost to develop the Linux code from scratch, the result is 10,800 million , speaking specifically of the distribution Fedora 9 which was made available to the public the 13 May 2008 .The process of software costs measuring is a really important factor in the analysis of a project. There are various methods for estimating software development costs, also known as metric software .The vast majority of these methods are based on the measuring the number of lines of code (LDC) containing the development (excluding comments and blank lines from the sources).Software development costs Details of development of Fedora 9

In the above-mentioned report “Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution” is estimated to

Fedora 9 has a value of 10.8 billion dollars and the kernel would cost only a value of 1 , 4 billion dollars .This distribution has a 205 million lines of code and effort invested by a single person during alagaría developed some 60,000 years .As we see in the table below ( “Difficulty of a project according to its lines of code”) the project should be developed by 1000 to 5000 developers and this estimate is not too far out as in the past 2 years have contributed some 3,200 developers although the number of workers in the history of the distribution is much greater. Difficulty of a project according to its lines of code