Have you got some loose change in your pocket, and dreams of building a better operating system? It would take about 25 years, nearly 60,000 developer-years, and $10.8B to re-create a distribution like Fedora 9, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation.

One implication of the study seems to be that companies wishing to economize, in these tough economic times, would do well to leverage all of the value in free and open source software. That value, the Linux Foundation report discloses, is considerable. For example, the Linux kernel alone would take $1.4B to build, and an estimated 16 years to complete. No wonder the Free Software Foundation never got anywhere with Hurd.

The Foundation chose Fedora 9, even though it is smaller than some other Linux distributions, because Fedora uses open source software exclusively, with the aim of creating a completely redistributable operating system. Thus, using Fedora 9 is a good way to limit the scope of the study to “open source only” software.

Click below to learn more about the study, at our sister site, Linux-Watch.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.